Romancing the Stone Author:Catherine Lanigan writing as Joan Wilder Romance is what makes Joan Wilder's world go round--that is, her professional world. In real life, the best-selling romance author is a shy, quiet young woman whose first few timid brushes with love have left her gun-shy. And while her heroine lives for passion and danger, Joan prefers serenity. While her heroine falls rapturously into the arms ... more »of heroic gunslingers, the closest Joan comes to love is watching teenaged couples hold hands on the street below her window.
Then a phone call form her sister, Elaine, sends her reeling out of her quiet life and into an adventure as exciting and perilous as anything she ever imagined. Elaine, who has gone to Columbia to recover the body of her recently deceased husband, has been kidnapped! the kidnappers want Joan to come to Columbia with an ancient map that had been left in her care. If they don't get the map, Elaine will die.
The adventure begins the minute Joan lands in Colombia. A mysterious man directs her to the wrong bus. The bus, which is taking her hundreds of miles in the wrong direction, is ambushed by Columbian police. Before she knows it, Joan is bushwhacking her way through miles of dense jungle, her life--and her sister's--in the hands of a handsome stranger who got her out of harm's way at the ambush...and is now finding his way into her heart.
But the path to love, Joan soon discovers, is treacherous. Nobody can be trusted--not the police, who seem as eager for the map as the kidnappers, and who dog her step at every turn; and not Jack, who does help her out of some pretty tight spots, but who also shows a suspiciously eager interest in the map. Soon Joan will have to call on some resources that she thought only belonged to romance heroines--to save her sister, and live to face her own passion.
Romancing the Stone, now a hit movie starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, is a captivating tale of romance and adventure whose every page is a real gem.« less