How many times in life does a person get a second chance? Most of us fall into patterns in our lives, and we just keep living the same patterns day after day because we love whom we love, we live how we live, we compromise where we must, and the patterns that make up our lives work to keep us in a never-ending cycle. Content or not, we lie in the beds we have made for ourselves. What happens when the life we lead is shattered by the death of a spouse? How do we go on?

In Tip of the Iceberg, Ann Jacobs begins with the death of Susan, Casey Weldon's beloved spouse, a promise made and the changes that result. Ex football player Casey is our grieving widower, and his sickly Susan could not have been more loved. She had extracted a deathbed promise from him to return East, and that is what prompted him to give up football to take up a position on the faculty of his North Carolina alma mater. He is hired to revitalize the dying sports program, but once he is there he realizes not only that something is fishy--everything from philandering coaches to dyslexic athletic stars to damning statistics--but that the entire department is riddled with problems. To make it worse, his children are having trouble adjusting to the loss of their mother and the move to North Carolina; and unexpectedly, Casey is attracted to an acerbic professor "who wore her ugly brown suit like armor and whose expression would freeze hell in August" and whose sheer physical health--contrasting poor Susan--captures his interest in a big way.

Tip of the Iceberg is a cross-genre thriller/mystery erotica with a dash of consensual playful BDSM. One of the interesting notes this book hits is a presentation of one of the variabilities of the components of a unique BDSM relationship. One might expect the Dom/me to be consistently the one in charge, but contemporary consensual BDSM relationships may well have a powerful sub taking control at times, in or out of the bedroom. So don't expect a fainting die-away submissive here; in this story, there are two very strong protagonists. The only real drawback to this well-drawn book is that some of the more compound complex sentences could have used a bit of editorial rearrangement, but all in all, it is still a good read.

Reviewed By Maîtresse
© September 2005