Avon (Paperback), ISBN 0-06-000924-1

Jane Alcott leads a bit of a double life. She writes the Single Girl in the City column for the Seattle Times, an adventures-in-dating feature taken from her own dating experiences as a 30-something searching for love and merely finding like or lust. Unbeknownst to everyone else, she also writes The Life of Honey Pie for Him magazine. A far cry from her Single Girl dating experiences, Honey Pie's steamy sexual exploits leave her male victims in a coma.

When the Times' regular hockey reporter goes on extended medical leave, Jane gets tapped to fill in for him, despite never having written on a sports beat before. The team's management wants to draw more female fans to the games, and so Jane gets the assignment to travel with the team and cover the games.

Hockey players exhibit numerous superstitions. The Seattle Chinooks are afraid that traveling with a woman will jinx them. The players conspire to stonewall her. They answer her questions as briefly as possible, drop their pants in near-synchronicity and generally shut Jane out. Especially goaltender Luc "Lucky" Martineau. A bad boy with a wild past which he tries to put behind him, Luc doesn't talk to reporters. At all. But the horseshoe tattoo on his lower belly catches Jane's attention. Frequently.

When the Chinooks, who occupy in good position for a Stanley Cup run, begin losing, Jane's traveling with the team comes to an end. Angry and upset, she nevertheless forces herself to visit the locker room before a game and thank them for the experience. On her way out, she encounters Luc, whom she views as the source of her firing, and she blasts him. Lo and behold, the Chinooks win. Now considered the team's lucky charm, "Sharky" gets her job back, and the delicious tension between Jane and Luc builds.

But during the brief period before being rehired, Jane wrote another Honey Pie installment, one where the not-named-but-still-apparent Seattle goalie got humped into a coma. When the issue hits the stands, Jane fears for the tenuous, but steamy, relationship that developed between her and Luc.

See Jane Score makes for a hilarious read, especially for hockey fans (or female journalists who cover hockey). Not only does Rachel Gibson write a sweet and steamy romance, she gets the hockey jargon dead on, right down to the descriptions of puck bunnies. Gibson fleshes out her characters terrifically, making them much more than one dimensional heroes or heroines.

Jen Foote

Jen Foote recently moved to central Florida, where she is a copy editor and page designer at a small daily newspaper. She is ecstatic to live an hour away from the ocean.

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