Arabesque, $5.99, ISBN 1-58314-120-0
Romantic Suspense, 2000

More Than Gold is a member of the CIA/FBI/Secret Agent Hunk Guards My Body romance novels club. It is a pretty good read too, except that for some reason, the intelligent and feisty Morgan Kirkwood has completely morphed into some silly bunny who keeps getting into trouble by the end of the story. What is going on?

Morgan Kirkwood is a talented gymnast who won a gold medal back in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul when she was 19. Even then, in between practices, she managed to aid CIA to release a Korean political prisoner. You can’t get more overachieving than that.

Today, Morgan is happily living her life when some nasty scumbags, still mad at her Olympic subterfuge, pop up to inflict some mean damage on her body. She calls for help, and immediately hero Jack Temple runs for our heroine’s aid.

Morgan starts out a pretty good heroine. A survivor of a bad childhood, she is nobody’s fool. If bad guys want to do her in, well, not if she can help it! But as the story progresses, she seems to lose more and more of her fine-honed instincts for survival. I half-expect her to jump screaming at the sight of cockroaches somewhere around page 200. Jack fares better as a superhero bodyguard and bedroom sex god.

Still, not a bad read.