Ronnie Honneker likes the idea of being Senator Lewis Honneker's wife much more than she actually likes being married to him. She may prefer the status of her marriage: the power, the prestige, the wealth, the comforts and beautiful things that such a marriage provides, but for Ronnie it is also an acutely lonely marriage. For she is the second wife. Married to the Honorable Lewis Honneker, a man twice her age who is wealthy, successful, and revered by the voters in his home state of Mississippi.

What the public doesn't know is that this pillar of the community is actually quite fond of engaging in casual indiscretions. Now he is running for re-election and his lovely young wife is expected to stand beside him. Though she is publicly scorned as the woman who broke up the senator's first marriage, Ronnie does her best to promote her husband's re-election campaign. Yet her husband is not the man she thought he was, and although long accustomed to it, Ronnie despises the strain of the campaign trail - especially the constant facade and total lack of privacy.

The glamorous political life can't make up for the emptiness deep in her heart, a dark space which she fears will never be filled. Until political strategist Tom Quinlan enters the picture. Hired to soften Ronnie's public image, Tom prides himself on his work, never mixing business with pleasure. Solid, quietly handsome, the quintessential southern boy-next-door, he is called in to enhance Senator Honneker's campaign and he takes his job very seriously.

To him, Ronnie is a job. Certainly a challenging one; but remaking Mrs. Honneker's public image is nothing more than a routine assignment to Tom Quinlan. Ronnie Honneker is perhaps one of Tom's most challenging assignments - she is difficult to direct, and can definitely test any man's patience. So why does he find himself unable to stop thinking about her? Her flowing auburn hair, her long, perfectly muscled legs, those inviting chocolate-brown eyes? Tom has never allowed himself to surrender to such feelings. . .until now.

Ronnie never expected to find love again; and certainly not with a man like Tom Quinlan. However, as much as she may try, she just can't ignore the desire that Tom ignites in her or the newly-awakened passions that he inflames within her - feelings she'd once thought were gone forever. And she knows that the tempers flaring between them are just a cover for their barely contained passions. Together they discover that love and politics make uneasy bedfellows as they must contend with their developing attraction to each other, a swarm of snooping reporters, and a public which is growing increasingly suspicious of their relationship.

Yet when the senator is found murdered and Ronnie is accused of the crime, only Tom believes she is innocent. Now the two must work together to uncover the senator's sordid secrets; as the Honorable Lewis Honneker died while in the midst of a particularly sticky scandal. But as the stakes rise, they learn that they must watch their backs. And follow their hearts.

While I certainly enjoyed the plot of this story; in my personal opinion, there was an overly heavy focus on the romance of the plot. Whereas I perhaps would have appreciated fewer graphic sexually explicit scenes in the story - I prefer for the romantic scenes to be left up to the reader's imagination more often, I suppose - I really enjoyed the mysterious part of the plot. Overall, I would give The Senator's Wife by Karen Robards a B+!

I think that I have at least two more of Ms. Robards' books on my bookshelf that I'd be interested in searching out and reading sometime in the future, but for right now it's not imperative to me. ( )