I love Ali Dean’s sports romances. It’s been that way since I read the first in her Pepper Jones series and walked away totally addicted both to the romance and the feeling of really being an insider on the sport (cross country in that case). That’s probably why I glommed on Black Diamond when I saw it. If anything this book was even better than the Pepper Jones books (a very high bar as those books are so superb that I’ve re-read that series several times). So much so that I’ve addictively binge read through Double Black and Black Ice too. Why? Because not only do we once again get so far into the head of a top athlete as to really feel like an insider in the sport itself, in this case skiing, but we also get high business intrigue and a real thriller of a suspense. Roxie and Ryker’s romance in Stark Springs Academy series is also simply beautifully done. The series has reached a logical stopping point at book 3, but I’m not going to call it a trilogy as I’m hoping for more (hey, there’s precedent here: the Pepper Jones stories reached logical stopping points at times but the author still found ways to continue the series with new novels that worked beautifully). But for the fact that I’m literally dictating this review to my husband from my hospital bed I could go on and on with praises - each of the books in this series definitely deserves it. Since I can’t do that I will simply note that this series is most definitely one to read, and it is easy to highly recommend each book.