At twenty-five, Princess Adrianne lives a life most people would envy.  Beautiful and elegant, she spends her days dabbling in charities and her nights floating from one glamorous gala to the next.  But her pampered-rich-girl pose is a ruse, a carefully calculated effort to hide a dangerous truth.

For ten years Adrianne has lived for revenge.  As a child, she could only watch the cruelty hidden behind the facade of her parents' fairy-tale marriage.  Now
she has the perfect plan to make her famous father pay.  She will take possession of the one thing he values above all others--The Sun and the Moon, a fabled necklace beyond price.

Yet just as she is poised to take her vengeance, she meets a man who seems to divine her every secret.  Clever, charming, and enigmatic, Philip Chamberlain has his own private reasons for getting close to Princess Adrianne.  And only when it's too late will she see the hidden danger...as she finds herself up against two formidable men--one with the knowledge to take her freedom, the other with the power to take her life.

This is a fun-to-read adventure. The thief character is fully developed, engrossing, & interesting. You root for her. Her mother, who finds herself trapped in a harem, adds another layer of emotion and intrigue. The plot takes the reader all over the world and moves quickly.

I absolutely loved this book! The fantasy fairytale of the prince and the beauty drew me in instantly. I almost didn't buy it because I'm not much of a "jewel thief" book fan, but this is soooo much more! I was so drawn to the lead character and her story that I couldn't bring myself to put it down.

The first part of this book is the set up and background story of Adrianne and Philip. You learn about their childhoods and I felt it was really interesting and well-written. I kept thinking wow, I'm really going to feel for this couple because I feel like I "know" them. Well, when it finally got to the parts where the hero/heroine interact I wasn't feeling much at all. The chemistry wasn't there for me and I just thought it was kind of boring. I've read 5 Nora Roberts books so far and this is the one I like the least. I will keep on reading them though because I know what she is capable of.

This was my very first Nora Roberts book. I read it when I was thirteen or fourteen, having just read Sidney Sheldon's If Tomorrow Comes, and was on a thief-as-heroine kick. This book began a long love affair with Nora's books, as she was just beginning to break away from the Silhouette serial format and perfect the Nora formula--very strong heroines far from the romance novel stereotype, beautiful, witty, main characters who you'd love to have as your friends, alternative family structures when biological families fail (the heroine's "Aunt Phoebe"), and the suspense plot (the paranormal and Irish element would not begin to dominate her books for a few years).

Those are the things I love about Roberts. However, one of her big flaws is here too. Nora's prolific writing habits result in a diversity of settings and professions for her books, but no human being could know enough to portray the complexity of all of her subject matter in a competent way. I have often been annoyed at her unrealistic portrayal of people in a variety of professions at the top of their fields at impossibly young ages, but that, of course, is part of the fantasy. Here, the absence of complexity is a more disturbing and damaging, because the depiction of the despotic, harem-owning, Middle-Eastern leader is pretty over-the-top (the frequent over-the-top villain is another one of her less than fabulous plot features). Please don't write this off as a "PC" critique. This is only a warning for people who, like the reader from Alabama, comments that this teaches her about the the Middle East, or for readers like the one who picked the book up and was understandably offended by the cartoonish depiction of the evil Arab father. I am not denying that there is misogyny in the Middle East (there is all over the world). But there's no doubt that this feeds into a representation of the Middle East that, if we read more widely, is far from the the complex histories and social structures in a variety of different countries.

As my first Nora, it holds a special place in my heart, but it does not hold up for me almost twenty years later because of the stereotyping.

Written in true Nora Roberts style. This will be a book that I read over and over again.