Book Two of the Cougar Challenge series.

Edie Howard is sick of her third ex-husband parading his bimbo trophy wife. Though she's been a supermodel under the professional name 'Sunset', she's retired now and knows how fickle the business is. Self-conscious about her looks, she decides to have plastic surgery to boost her confidence. Maybe then she'll feel good about taking part in the Cougar Challenge with her friends. When she turns up for the initial consultation, she's dismayed to find herself attracted to gorgeous Asian-American surgeon John Sung. He takes one look at her and declares he can't perform surgery on her, and passes her on to a colleague.

Edie is both startled and turned-on. When she meets John later, he tells her he thinks she's perfect as she is. Edie doesn't believe him. John makes a bet with her-she must tell him where she thinks she needs work done, and he'll try to convince her that she's absolutely perfect as she is. What starts as an erotic game quickly becomes something more as both Edie and John become emotionally involved, but then John sees her in the clinic with a bandage over her nose, and he's furious at what he believes is a breach of trust. She's had surgery despite what she promised him. Edie has a very good reason for having the nose-job-but will John stick around long enough to hear the truth?

Beauty of Sunset is probably the most thought-provoking book of the Cougar Challenge series, mixing the erotic romance with the more serious issue of plastic surgery and a woman's right to choose what to do with her body, and the whys and wherefores of this type of surgery. The book had quite a few editorial errors, mainly missing commas, which pulled me out of the story, and while I liked the hero John, I found Edie a bit too self-absorbed. The Hollywood angle of the story gives it an edge and though this isn't the strongest book in the series, it's definitely worth a read.

Reviewed by: Maija