Following a formula

Readers of Danielle Steel know what they are getting: a strong woman who has had trouble in life, but who faces it bravely; a handsome man, also with a troubled past; some sort of shenanigans to create a plot; and an assurance that things will more or less work out. Said readers will be delighted to know that all their expectations will be met in her newest book, Dangerous Games.

Alix Phillips is a dashing news reporter who gets sent off to dangerous spots around the world. Where there are wars, riots, scandals, Alix goes. Assisting and protecting her is an ex-Navy SEAL cameraman, Ben Chapman. Alix’s boss, Felix, has a nagging suspicion that the vice  president of the United States, Tony Clark, is illegally taking money from lobbyists. He asks Alix to investigate. She is reluctant to do so. But on one of her assignments to the Middle East, Alix finds out that Clark had visited businessmen in Saudi Arabia and taken money from them to put in his Swiss Bank account. In order to find out more about Clark, Alix talks to Olivia, the widow of Clark’s now-deceased friend and running mate, Bill Foster. Olivia is devoted to her late husband and to Clark, unable to believe the latter could be doing anything underhanded. Somewhere along the line, the CIA get involved, and now they are investigating Clark for corruption, too.

It turns out that Clark is indeed crooked, and that all he cares about is money and power. He’s a psychopath, in fact, and has been manipulating Olivia subtly all these years. Soon he finds out that Alix is smelling trouble and may be responsible for an investigation of his affairs. So what he does is...

Send Alix an anonymous letter telling her to stay away. Which she’s doing anyway, because the CIA told her to dissociate herself from the case. But anyhow, Alix gets alarmed and asks for armed protection for herself and her daughter. Just in time, too, because the next dangerous thing that happens to her is...

Another anonymous letter telling her even ‘more strongly’ to stay away. Over the course of the novel, the total amount of danger she comes to face from Clark is three anonymous letters. The astute reader will notice that her day-to-day job puts her closer to danger than the letters do, yet she’s more frightened of the letters.
Olivia is roped into the investigation against Clark, and she does it to keep the legacy of her late husband clean. And she does the very dangerous thing of wearing a microphone and asking Clark about his links to the lobbyists, while sitting at dinner with him.

But, perhaps the title Dangerous Games doesn’t refer to the Tony Clark storyline at all. At the beginning of the book, when Alix and Ben are described in pages-long info dumps, Steel tells us that they two think of each other as very good friends, but they are afraid to get any closer to each other because they don’t want to ruin their relationship. Both have had traumas in their early years, which make them leery of closeness. Through the course of the book, they begin to rely on each other more and more, with Alix moving into Ben’s house for protection from the anonymous letter threat. A few holidays in France later, they are talking of getting closer, and potentially getting married. As every married couple knows, these are much more dangerous games than an anonymous letter.

Nobody seems to get harmed over the course of this book, except the villain who gets his just desserts, of course. Instead, the incidental events that Alix reports on, and things like college bombings and riots form the real danger. Steel could have made the plot line appear that much more dangerous by making Alix a society reporter who’s never seen a gun. But Alix needs to be the typical Steel superwoman heroine who faces everything bravely.

The writing style is lazy-Steel, again not a bad thing for loyal readers. Multiple pages-long background information on each character, first-draft-style action scenes, the references to studying law, the inevitable digression to Paris (‘the most beautiful city in the world’) and the French countryside. Everybody talks in the same diction, like Enid Blyton characters. The reader is allowed to read the book without having to think much and is reminded of a happy saas-bahu serial episode before the next big crisis starts.
Crime and thrillers are clearly not Steel’s forte. The loyal reader is better served by rereading one of her older, more-sensitive, dramatic books