Princeton native Anne Stuart pushes the limits with her newest thriller, ‘Cold As Ice.’
By: Anthony Stoeckert
(ANNE STUART)
You’ve heard of working musicians; well, Anne Stuart is a working writer. First published 30 years ago, the Princeton native has carved out a solid career as a writer of romance and mystery novels. But her current "Ice" series could turn out to be a breakthrough.
"It’s very exciting," Ms. Stuart says during a telephone interview from her home in Vermont. "Because I have been (writing) for so long, and I’m finally getting some real feedback, some really good success that I’ve worked hard for for a long, long time."
That feedback includes reaching The New York Times bestseller list for the first time with Cold As Ice (Mira, $6.99), the follow-up to 2005’s Black Ice. Her books have previously made USA Today’s bestseller list.
Cold As Ice reads like a James Bond novel that begins at the point where Bond has already infiltrated the villain’s lair and is about to foil a plan for world domination. Only in Cold As Ice, completing the mission becomes complicated for the hero, British spy Peter Jensen, because an innocent woman ends up on board the yacht of the evil Harry Van Dorn just as Jensen is about to stop Van Dorn’s evildoing.
What’s driving Ms. Stuart’s writing these days is the "kick" she gets from writing about men who kill and the women who love them.
"The appeal of a man (who can be) as dark as you can possibly get and yet still redeem (himself) is very interesting to me," she says. "I’m really interested in seeing how (far) you can go."
The mystery genre is competitive, but Ms. Stuart believes she stands out from other writers because she takes her characters to such extremes.
"I do something that really nobody else does, which is convenient," she says with a laugh. "I have such very, very dark heroes. That’s dangerous because they are too dark for some readers, some readers will read one of my books and think the hero is just unacceptable and can’t be redeemed. But I never hold back, if it seems my character is going to do something, I’ll just go ahead and have them do it. And that opens up a lot of possibilities, I don’t feel censored (by thinking), ‘Would a hero do this?’ My heroes can do anything they want."
Series seem to be the backbone of the mystery section of the bookstore (think James Patterson’s Alex Cross thrillers or Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels heck, think back to Sherlock Holmes) but the "Ice" series is Ms. Stuart’s first. And even they stray from the typical formula; instead of following the same lead character through a new crime or mission in every title, Stuart shakes things up with every book. Peter Jensen, the lead character in Cold As Ice, was a supporting player in Black Ice and will have a small appearance in the third entry (due next spring) and a supporting part again in the fourth book.
"I didn’t realize it was going to be a series," Ms. Stuart says. "Series are very popular but I hadn’t actually ever written one and had no plans to. But I finished the first one and… it was time to start the next book and it kept sounding like the first ‘Ice’ book. And finally I realized I just didn’t want to leave that world. So I pulled Peter Jensen out of the first book and made him the hero of the second one. It was a complete surprise to me."
Ms. Stuart has been writing since her high school days. She grew up in a literary family her grandfather was the head of the classics department at Princeton University and her mother, Virginia Stuart, is a writer who leads writing groups in the area. Virginia has been writing short stories for years and published her first novel (Candle in a Dark Time, a young adult novel about the Holocaust) a few years ago, at the age of 89.
Ms. Stuart has always been an avid reader (growing up, she loved Nancy Drew books, though she says the Princeton Pubic Library was "too snotty" to carry them). She loved the town of Princeton, but hated high school. One thing she did like was writing stories about the Beatles and passing them around to her friends. After school, she moved to New York, working for the Rockefeller Foundation and reading as much as she could. Eventually she quit her job and made writing her profession.
Success came early. Her first novel got her an agent, and the agent got the book published within a year.
"In retrospect I know it was very easy," she says. "At the time it seemed like, ‘Well, what’s taking so long?’ But looking back, I was very lucky."
Ms. Stuart has always written mysteries and thrillers with romance elements and has no desire to write anything else. Her career has included a stint writing Harlequin romances, a job she found enjoyable, despite the publisher’s strict guidelines.
"They have a lot of rules about not using certain words, having to do it a certain way," she says. "After a while… they started letting me break the rules, so it was fun seeing how far I could go."
Today, her reputation allows her to do essentially anything she wants and it’s clear she enjoys pushing the limits with her successful "Ice" books.
"(Editors are usually) afraid other authors, even (if) they have a great idea, that it won’t really work and that readers might get scared off. They know that I somehow manage to carry it off."
Cold As Ice and other books by Anne Stuart are available at bookstores and at Amazon.com.

