Customer Reviews

Her Perfect Life (Signature Select)

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After spending six years as a POW in an Iraqi prison camp, Katie is rescued thanks to the efforts of a compassionate Iraqi officer and returns the US. During the rapes, the torture, the beatings, and the forced deprivation of food and water, only the hope that she would be reunited with her family helped her cling to hope. Imagine her shock when she returns only to find that her family has moved on and her husband has a new wife he has no intention of leaving.

With the help of her good friend and co-pilot CD, she is finds a job, lodging, and is reintroduced to her reluctant children who barely remember her. Her husband Sam seems more concerned with paying back the life insurance money than with welcoming his wife home. Sam intends to divorce Katie and remain with Blair and they iron out an amicable split to keep the children from further pain. Katie leans more and more on CD, who has always been in love with her and wants to have a future with her if she could only forget about Sam. She misconstrues this love for guilt over leaving her in the Gulf (despite his being unconscious and left for dead).

With the help of Blair (who let's face it is far too good to be true), Katie is able to develop a relationship with her children. She really wants to hate the other woman, but Blair makes that impossible, as the two become like sisters. Will she be able to move on from her past and forge a new life free of fears and nightmares?

This is a compelling subject that would have made an incredible fully developed novel. Author Hinze chose to concentrate on Katie's return, with mere glimpses of what she suffered while in Iraq, which was fine, but it only skimmed the surface of so many emotions in under 300 pages.

Shot down flying a mission over Iraq, Captain Katie Slater has been a prisoner of war for six years. Suffering abuse at the hands of her captors in silence, the only thing that has kept Katie sane is her need to see her husband and children again. Katie lies in her cell at night mourning the death of her copilot and wishing for the day someone will find her in her desert hell and she can once again be free. Katie's wish comes true days later when she is liberated.

Back in Florida, Katie is one unhappy captain. Something is wrong and no one will tell her what it is. Demanding answers and refusing to cooperate with her doctor, Katie wants to see her husband and her children and she wants to see them now. Katie's doctor finally relents and Katie is allowed to see her husband Sam after six long years. The reception Katie was expecting from Sam doesn't happen. When Sam comes clean about his life and their children, Katie has to be sedated.

C. D. Quade, Katie's copilot, can't believe the love of his life is alive! Filled with joy but tremendous guilt for all she suffered in the last six years, C. D. demands to see her. What he finds is a shell of the woman he has loved through life and death. Vowing that he will not leave Katie, C. D. sets out to prove to her just how much she is loved.

Katie has to fight her way back to normalcy. Refusing to talk about her time in captivity, she is unable to come to grips with her abuse and let it go. With C. D. by her side and her children slowly learning to love her again, Katie has a fight on her hands--a fight she will not let her now dead captors win.

Her Perfect Life by Vicki Hinze absolutely tore my heart out. I can't imagine being in Katie's shoes and the fact the story is so realistic made Her Perfect Life dearer to me. I wanted to choke her husband Sam but then couldn't fault him for decisions he made. As much as I couldn't stand Sam, I loved C. D. Patient, kind, and extremely supportive, I thought him the perfect love for Katie. As for Katie, if she were a real person, I would honor her bravery and service. Her character was that well written.

Her Perfect Life was emotional, romantic, and just an all around poignant read. It made me angry, laugh, cry, and then smile for a job well done. I feel Ms. Hinze honors the bravest of the brave with Her Perfect Life and I am proud to have read it.

Talia
Reviewed for Joyfully Reviewed

For six years Air Force pilot Katie Cole Slater has been a prisoner of war held by a warlord in Iraq, but now is free to go home. She survived her ordeal due to her now frayed photos of her husband Sam and their two children Molly and Jake. First the army psychiatrists want to know more about what went wrong. Katie is uncooperative as she is irate that they keep her from her family and that they assume team when she was abandoned and her team was that of one. Her motto now is do not depend on anyone except yourself. However, even home is not what it was when she went on active duty as her spouse Sam has remarried as she was assumed dead.

Heartbroken her only connection is her copilot C.D. Quade who she thought died when their plane crashed. Still she is irate with C.D. because he failed her in the desert by leaving her behind. C.D. feels guilty for what happened to Katie, the only woman he loves. He plans to help her readjust though her world has seemingly collapsed in the time she spent as a captive.

HER PERFECT LIFE is a tense character study that grips readers from the moment that a justified belligerent Katie comes home and has to deal with the brass, a remarried former husband, and the belief that her pal deserted her. The story line is totally Katie as she adjusts to life in a strange America after six plus years of captivity. The romance between her and C.J. augment a strong look at a former POW trying to regain her equilibrium.

Harriet Klausner

This book is a keeper, one of the best I've read by this author. A woman who's lost six years of her life in captivity returns to have her world turned upside down. Expecting a clich?d TV-movie script, I was delighted to read instead a story about real people struggling with emotions and adjustments. No stereotypes or predictible plot here. I heartily recommend this story about a woman's struggle to re-claim her life.

Only Vicki Hinze could write such an insightful, passionate, human drama and still call it romantic suspense. Yet, if Danielle Steel had written this moving story, there would be an immediate clamor to adapt it for television, especially since it is about a woman air force pilot shot down over Iraq in the Gulf War. This novel should be on screen. It delves into the depths of a woman, who, by virtue of being a combat pilot, makes her a different breed from other heroines.

Few authors explore what drives a woman to fly in male-dominated skies. Is it competition? Is it arrogance? To fly today's fighter jets she has to be precise, smart and have calculating nerve under stress, the same as any top gun. Robert Gandt, a former top gun himself, writes military thrillers and depicts two kinds of women combat pilots in his stories: those who use their gender to make a political statement--they have ambition but they are actually unsuitable to fly--and those who are born with flying in their blood. He recognizes there is no sexual difference between real "flyers." There is only their desire to soar and to feel the spiritual freedom birds experience. A born flyer is a very independent being. To be in a military environment would seem to be an oxymoron for such independent souls, but for all of their apparent daring and brash nerve, genuine pilots are very grounded people. They have an innate discipline and spiritual awareness of "being at one" with their aircraft, its flight/ground crew and, at times, with the supreme maker of the Universe.

Understanding this is what makes Vicki Hinze's heroine, Captain Katie Cole Slater, a fascinating study. Her will to survive through torture and rape--endless days, months, years of captivity--stems as much from the natural courage of being a woman, who is a wife and mother, as it does from her innate drive to become a pilot. Her mantra--"That which is endured is conquered"--builds momentum through the novel as she gains remarkable wisdom and strength during her journey into hell as a prisoner of war and through smashed dreams when she returns. She rises above the expected bitterness that many in her shoes would feel, and she does it in a most credible way--through the interior dialogue the character shares with the author's readers.

I dare say the reason Katie triumphs over such devastating blows may be because she is a woman and not a man. She benefits from a woman's nurturing nature. Nevertheless, Katie's psychological resolution is in sharp contrast to the experience of nurses returning from Viet Nam as depicted in the TV series, "China Beach," where the lead character became an alcoholic when she couldn't reconcile her life at war with her life in peacetime. Katie triumphs. She finds love; she reclaims her two children without disrupting or separating them from everyone they love; and she channels the sense of achievement she gained from flying into a different passion designing gardens. She has a whole life; she loses it, and she regains it fully, but at a price. Traumatic flashbacks still possess her ten years later, but she makes peace with them--she lets them go. And they gradually fade into the past where they belong.

Captain Katie Cole Slater's personal belief system sets up a remarkable role model for any victimized women regardless of the reason or circumstance. This is why this story must be made into a movie. It not only deals with the individual battle endured by those up close and personal with "the actual enemy" but also with what so many North American families are coping with today in the West's global war against terrorism: the waiting and the loss of those they love; for even when they are lucky enough to embrace their loved ones again, they are forever changed--often physically, but definitely emotionally, psychologically and philosophically. Both women and men need to see that bad things that happen to people, whether in war or in their daily lives, can result in good endings.

Thank you, Vicki, for telling Katie's story. I loved it.

The plot is laid out sufficiently in other reviews, so I will be brief. This is an outstanding book! It is far more complex and emotional than a typical "romance" novel. It is about love on many levels - maternal, familial and romantic. All of the characters are exceedingly well-drawn and believable, and it is impossible not to share in their tragedies and triumphs. And yes, it does leave the reader with a real appreciation for the men and women who make the commitment to serving and protecting our country.

A Perfect Life by Vicki Hinze
Signature Select Spotlight - April 2006

A Perfect Life is a powerfully intense story of a woman who gives everything to serve her country.

USAF Captain Katie Slater is shot down over Iraq and taken badly injured by enemy combatants. Her co-pilot CD, is mercifully rescued. The military intelligence on the ground in Iraq pass on the news that Katie is dead, and her nation and family begin to move on without her. After six years in captivity, Katie is spotted by a French doctor providing aid to the poor in the tribal village where she is held. Finally, Katie is going home to her husband and her two children. Katie has learnt that to "endure is to conquer" and in the six years of captivity she has endured only because of the hope and knowledge that her captors could not take away her family. Returning to the US, Katie quickly discovers that she is wrong. Her captors gave her life to another woman, who is now her husband's wife and mother to her two children. Katie once again must endure, only this time she is not alone. CD, her co-pilot and best friend, is there with her every step of the way. CD's always loved Katie best, as Katie's mother Grace points out to everyone. Katie soon comes to realize that in all the years of her marriage she'd never truly been in love with her husband Sam. The bond that she had with CD had always been stronger. With the love of her family and CD, Katie learns that she has everything to make her perfect life.

I read this one in June 2006. I was reluctant to read this book because of the subject matter, and I will point out here, that this is not a story for everyone. Throughout the story, Katie has flashbacks to the torturous treatment and these may be very upsetting to some.

This is also a beautiful story of the power to heal that love has. Katie knows that to heal she needs to feel loved again, and when her husband Sam tells her he has moved on without her, she is devastated. But there is CD, with love and arms open wide, ready to give Katie everything she needs to find her place again.

This is a story of real people who struggle with their emotions and with the adjustments needed to turn their upside down world right side up again. Ms Hinze weaves a magic that grabs at your heart strings and pulls you in.

A Perfect Life was a 2007 RITA Finalist for Best Novel with Strong Romantic Elements

Vicki Hinze's HER PERFECT LIFE well-deserves the RITA nominee as Best Mainstream from Romance Writers of America. The RITA is RWA's version of the Oscar. Hinze's writing is top notch and the story meets and transcends genre expectations while fulfilling even larger goals.

Vicki Hinze has truly hit her stride again with this marvelous book. As the author, she truly "walked in the soul" of Katie. There is not other way she could have depcited the raw emotions of a woman who stayed alive for six years dreaming of something that, when she comes face to face with it again, is not only gone, but belongs to someone else. The story of how Katie reconstructs her life is a masterpiece of fictional writing.

On a scale of 1 - 10 -- THIS book is a 12. The author made me care so much about the hero and heroine, and what trials a woman who is in the military, as well as a wife and mother, must survive and over come. It's also about recognizing love where it wasn't expected. A powerful and magic book.