Impact

Impact is a 1986 Harlequin romance by Madeleine Ker, published as a 187-page paperback.

The plot is a triangle with an unusual amount of pressure applied from one side. Lili is engaged to Martin, and Martin wants his cousin Daniel to approve of her. Instead Daniel treats her as a target, using small attentions and deliberate provocation to sever the engagement. Because he is both charming and relentless, Lili cannot dismiss him the way she would like to, and the novel follows her as her loyalty becomes harder to sustain. Martin is her fiance and Daniel is his cousin, and what Daniel applies is made up of hints, gestures, caresses and kisses rather than any open declaration.

The image the publisher uses is a pair of scales weighted unequally, with Lili sliding from one man towards the other, and the book is built on that sense of being pulled rather than choosing. Ker wrote for the category market, and the title's motorsport backdrop gives it a specific texture rather than a generic one, with a professional world around the couple that both enables and complicates the affair. The racing calendar also supplies the book’s deadlines, since drivers and teams move between countries on a fixed schedule. The racing world the book borrows from reaches as far as the Le Mans endurance race.