Hidden Nature by Nora Roberts

Hidden Nature

3/5. Her latest romantic suspense standalone about the woman recovering back in her home town after getting shot (she’s natural resources police). She gets interested in a series of disappearances, and also meets the new local contractor.

You know what’s the most starry-eyed fantasy of a Nora Roberts book? It’s not the romance – this one is rather lifeless. It’s not even the ubiquity of honest and dedicated cops (she put a black cop in this one, you guys, if you’re keeping track of Nora Roberts’s flailing and minuscule attempts to grapple with her career of coppaganda).

No, the biggest fantasy is of home renovation that is quick, easy, successful, and beautiful. Mostly done, in this case, by a guy who apparently . . . learned his trade skills in a summer with Habitat for Humanity and that’s it? I have concerns.

Content notes: Violence, murder, usual killer POV grossness.

The Obsidian Tower by Melissa Caruso

The Obsidian Tower

3/5. Fantasy about the woman who is the one with apparently necromantic magic in a family of vivomancers, and what happens when the door her family has guarded for thousands of years (they have a stupid rhyme about it and everything) is opened.

I picked this up because I liked her more recent release. This has many of the same good elements: bisexual heroine, complex webs of relationships, actual politics, and interest in friendship and teamwork. But I did not like this one nearly so much. I am generally in a bad mood right now, so take this as you will, but the protag’s repeated emotional victimization by two-thirds of the people in the book (including herself), and how she takes on guilt for basically everything, and her self-sacrificing tendencies really irritated me. I imagine the arc of this trilogy will be towards better relationships and some actual self-worth but meh, I’m not along for the ride.

Content notes: Torture.