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Dr. Anya Clayborne loves her career. As a celebrity archeologist, she gets to go to exotic places and get her hands dirty while sifting through dirt and mud in search of priceless relics. But this time her job takes her to Florida, where stones with ancient markings turn up at a construction site for the Clare Springs Children’s Cancer Center. Needless to say, when she calls a halt to the construction, she becomes highly unpopular, and she attracts the attention of someone who wants to do her harm.
Jesse Marchetti works for the government, protecting priceless objects and the archeologists who dig them up. When he’s sent to a dig site in Florida, he learns that Dr. Clayborne is not only pretty, but she’s also stubborn to a fault. She’s more interested in excavating artifacts than her own safety. Marchetti soon discovers that something else might be going on besides the halt of a construction site, and he needs to find out what it is before any more people die.
As far as romantic suspense goes, Carved in Stone is a pretty good one, though there’s more romance than suspense, so I didn’t enjoy the read quite as much as I wanted to.
Dr. Anya Clayborne comes across as stiff and a bit unlikable. She’s one of those women who think that men are stupid if they don’t love a woman for her brain, which I found annoying. While Jesse Marchetti is all tough male and federal agent, it feels as if the author is trying to make him sound good strictly based on what he thinks of Anya in comparison to women who use their looks to attract men—which Anya would never do. Yes, Anya is self-confident, and she doesn’t care if a man is attracted to her looks, but she’s also self-righteous about it. Again, annoying.
Though I understand that the romance usually comes first in a romantic suspense, I still wanted to read more about what was going on with the stones, as well as more about the dig, and just more archeology in general. The suspense could have been ramped up a little more, too. So while Carved in Stone isn’t a bad read, and it’s very well-written, it still comes across as ho-hum—and it may not be as satisfying as you’d like it to be.
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