lightreads | Entries tagged with au: nora roberts

Nightwork

3/5. He is a self-taught international jewel thief who meets the love of his life in Shakespeare seminar, then quickly abandons her when his past comes calling. They meet again a decade later when he is taking a sabbatical as a high school English/drama teacher and she is writing a book, like you do?

I keep wondering why these Nora Roberts standalone modern romances are so compelling. It’s not the romances, we’ve established that. Those are always too heteronormative for me (not all het romances are, but hers…yeah). And it’s not the plots, those are window dressing and she knows it. So WTF is it? I think it’s that she gives good life writing. You know, here’s 50 pages in which someone lives a decade, with just the right amount of specificity and the right amount of blur. And I think, specifically, that she writes life studies rather than character studies. How they turn, how they change, where the road goes, where it doesn’t. All of that illuminates character, but that’s a result, not a cause. It’s not the sort of thing I would say I like, but she is damn good at it. I suppose she better be, at this point.

Content notes: Death of a parent to cancer, threats of violence, thieving made sexy.

Desperation in Death

3/5. Yet another big international evil organization book, in this case sex trafficking. Interesting to me not for that – these are my least favorite subtype In Death book, they make no god damn sense. But this one is about how much things have changed for Eve, how much she has integrated her trauma, to be able to work the case the way she does. It’s a bit of a victory lap, tbh. Fair.

Content notes: Captivity, grooming, sex trafficking

Encore in Death

3/5. A return to the twisty, personal, complicated murders. It’s kind of about the compromises you make in marriage – for love, specifically – and the sacrifices you don’t. But that part doesn’t have any real teeth as it is not really reflecting on Eve and Roarke. Also, the timeline of this series continues to be absolutely boggling – she’s been writing these for a quarter century, and they’ve only covered what, barely three years of story time? In sixty books? ~~Nora Roberts~~ These people really are workaholics.

Content notes: Murder

Abandoned in Death

3/5. A solid procedural entry with a lot of complicated backstory about child abandonment and amnesia and reinventing a self from scratch that was absorbing to read, but that tangles up badly in the end. This book is confused and conflicted about fault, and who can be blamed for the inception of violence. It's fine to be conflicted about that, but Roberts doesn't want to be, she wants her usual black-and-white view of fault. So she writes this ambiguous, tricky story of a parent abandoning a child through some fault and some horrible circumstance, and draws the obvious parallels to Eve and Roarke, both abandoned by their parents in different and terrible ways. And she could have let that breathe, and sit with everything else the series has done on the theme of hurt children constructing themselves into whole adults capable of love and happiness. But nope. She had to simplify it, had to say oh, well, this five-year-old child subjected to a horrible trauma, he was already a baby sociopath before that (what?), so – she doesn't actually have an end to that explanation, it's just really important that she cut through the knot to absolve and assign blame.

It all made me think, wincingly, about how mad Eve gets whenever she catches a killer who is actually mentally ill. Like it makes her furious whenever anyone suggests that maybe someone should be in a psych facility instead of one of these famed off-planet prisons. And Eve can always tell at a glance, you see, being an expert or something. A symptom of the same pathology – the overpowering need to center the fault for violence entirely within the person committing it, as if violence just springs out of no context.

Content notes: Child abandonment, captivity, murder.

Tribute

3/5. Classic Nora about the granddaughter of a famous Hollywood star returning to the country house her grandmother supposedly committed suicide in to restore it from the inside out, except someone doesn't want her digging into the house's secrets. Lots of home design and decorating talk, with that usual thing where the making of the home is a metaphor for the making of the self. Published exactly when you think it is for a book that really wants to sell you on how great it is to be a house flipper. Major bonus points for the heroine explicitly being super hot because she's good with power tools and the hero – who decidedly is not – being way into it. Minus points for the hero being a classic Nora Roberts boundary violator (he watches her through binoculars for two hours! For "work"! Christ.)

Content notes: Violence, bad parenting.

Forgotten in Death

3/5. The new In Death book. A nice pair of mysteries which managed to be interesting even when the solutions were apparent early on. I do wonder how much editing she really gets these days. These books combine an excellent attention to detail on the scene-by-scene basis, which makes sense as their chief pleasure is watching the protagonist interact with a vast colorful river of people. But there are also slip-ups that editorial really should catch, like changing someone from mixed race to white. Anyway, a solid entry, though I will keep saying it and keep saying it and keep saying it: introducing diversity into your books counts for exactly zero when that diversity is in the form of the victims of murder.

Content notes: Racism, murder, including of a pregnant woman.

Legacy

4/5. A standalone new release from earlier this year about the daughter of a fitness guru growing up and surviving the violence of her father the one time she meets him, and the legacy of that in her family and his. I liked this one. It has a deep well of coziness and homemaking and community creating, like a lot of her books do (and yes, of course there is interior decorating). Our heroine comes home to a tiny town where she has deep roots, and sets those roots even deeper. And yeah there's a suspense plot about a threat to her, but honestly whatever, those passages are just misogynist villain POV, not worth the time.

This book did make me realize that a core part of the Nora Roberts fantasy is a conviction that passion for a thing = success at a thing = great monetary reward, QED. I mean, I guess this is a thing you would believe in your bones if you are Nora Roberts. But most of these people are remarkably successful at the sorts of niche and creative careers where a teeny tiny fraction of people do extraordinarily well and a slightly bigger fraction make a living, and pretty much everyone else has to do something else. E.g., in this book, owning an indie comics company or writing musical hits. It's a nice fantasy, I suppose, if you believe that capitalism is here to reward the virtuous, but I can't really take it seriously.

Content notes: Death of a spouse and of parents/grandparents, violence, misogyny, fatphobia really in the water in this one.

Shelter in Place

3/5. The survivors of a mass shooting carry on with their intersecting lives. Years later, one is a cop and another an artist (successful and well-paid, naturally!) and they find each other as another threat approaches. Less cozy than Legacy, but with another take on finding community, this time on a tiny island off the coast of Maine. Plus there's a stray dog. Classic.

Content notes: Villain POV complete with homophobia and antisemitism and lots of violence. Mass shooting.

The Liar

4/5. Upon her husband's death in a boating accident, young mother discovers he was lying about a lot of things, and he's left her with a mountain of debt and a lot of questions. His drama follows her back to her home town, where she's beginning a tentative romance with a local contractor.

From the beginning of Roberts's Home Renovation Period (it's like a Blue Period but with more furniture shopping). I liked this one – the heroine embeds herself back into four generations of family, and there's an emphasis on female friendship (well, except for the requisite mean girl). The romance is, as usual, fine but forgettable. Don't read Nora Roberts for sweeping romance. Read for multiple generations of women being awesome and finding their way through early motherhood and hard times.

Content notes: References to violence, emotional abuse.

Faithless in Death

3/5. My least favorite type of mystery in this series, i.e. the unraveling of a vast international conspiracy as opposed to the solving of an intimate, personal crime. Also, she wrote this one when she was really mad about social justice – this book is really mad about using religion to excuse violence, and everyone's gotta speechify about how homophobia is bad, which, like. I appreciate it, Nora? But maybe try writing a book that contains queer people who are not (a) murdered or (b) evil? Like, just once?

Content notes: Trafficking, domestic violence, rape, forced impregnation, family separation.

Sea Swept, Rising Tides, and Inner Harbor by Nora Roberts

3/5. Trilogy of romances about three adoptive brothers coming back together after their father's death to raise the last boy he adopted.

Three very different romances – wild boy settles down, quiet boy carries torch way too long for single mother, pair of intense driven professionals learn to stop depersonalizing so much. But mostly these books are about family and how to build one out of broken parts. Pretty much every main character was subject to intense trauma at some point. Roberts isn't particularly interested in the slow hard work of recovery, but instead in what it looks like many years down the road, when it's not acute anymore, but maybe it's still shaping how you think about relationships. Also, the kid is aggressively cute.

Content notes: Recollections of child abuse, violence, sexual predation, etc.

Shadows in Death

3/5. She's just going to keep elaborating everyone's backstories for all of time to pull villains from empty air, eh? I'm okay with it. Less okay with the end of this book, which is a straight up exercise of police brutality which we are supposed to believe is character growth.

Content notes: Animal harm. Poor kitty.

Hideaway

3/5. Daughter of Hollywood royalty gets kidnapped as a child, rescues herself, and lives with the various and propagating consequences for many years. I should say for honesty's sake, though, that this will always in my mind be the book with sexy cow milking. Yes, really.

Roberts in my favorite mode, which I've been calling "romance in context." That is, a story that takes the heroine through several decades of life, in the rich context of her family and friends, to show how her eventual long-term romance isn't so much a destination but another turn in the road. And one that makes sense, given what has come before. This book also has some of her usual childhood trauma and suspense stuff, but she's honestly not very committed to it here and wraps that part of it up with a vague gesture. She's right, it's not the point.

Content notes: Child endangerment, child harm, bad parenting, one offscreen incident of racist violence.

Under Currents

3/5. Lawyer/landscaper romance in the small town where one grew up and one has fled. Phew, I had to skip big chunks of the first quarter of this one (child abuse, a lot of it) and this book in general is very . . . well, it's about a sweet, emotionally slow-burn romance complete with a cute dog and plucky teenagers, except around the edges there are multiple utterly depraved or hateful human beings ready to terrorize and murder. I realize that's the genre, but *shakes head* there's something off with this one. Too much brutality porn.

Content notes: Child abuse, gaslighting, spousal abuse, misogyny.

Nora Roberts grab bag. I did these like jello shots, guys, and I might be slightly queasy now.

The Obsession

3/5. The one where Nora Roberts really wanted to write 130,000 words on home rennovation and fournishing, and slapped a serial killer plot around the edges, but really guys, let's talk about flooring options and antique furniture. I mean, this does also have a nice arc of a traumatized loner builds a community but, come on, you know you want to hear about these bathroom tiles.

The Search

3/5. The one with all the doggos. Also a serial killer, but mostly doggos and dog training and search-and-rescue dogs. This holds up to very light scrutiny, at least to my eye as a person who teamed with working dogs for fourteen years. But I suspect she got a lot of this off Wikipedia or, like, a Netflix documentary. Whatever. I liked it. Carry on, Nora.

The Witness

2/5. Yeech. The one I wanted to like because the heroine can be read to be on the spectrum if you want to go that way. But I couldn't like it because this is one of the worst examples of Roberts' preferred brand of hero, the extremely pushy guy who acts in a way that would get any sensible woman's hackles up, let alone the extremely self-protective heroine's, except it's cool everybody, he's a nice guy ™ so he can do that.

Content notes: Rape, murder, child abuse, serial killers who hate women. Can do specifics, as usual.

Year One, Of Blood and Bone, and The Rise of Magicks

2/5. Apocalyptic fantasy about the special girl born as disease wipes out billions. She will lead us all out of darkness using really terrible rhyming couplets and magicks (never magic, always magicks, that's how you know it's extra serious).

Nora Roberts is not good at fantasy, you guys. Parts of this are unintentionally hilarious – magic sparkly pregnancy test, anyone? – but parts are just cringey – see the poetry. Don't get me wrong, I read all of this, but it is probably relevant to note that my excellent sleeper baby is having a rough few days, snoozle-wise, so. Take that as you will.

Blue Smoke

3/5. Romantic suspense about the arson investigator being stalked by the guy who tried to rape her when she was a kid. I think I need to lay off romantic suspense for a while, as I found this . . . actually stressful? Post-partum is wild, you guys.

Northern Lights

3/5. Romantic suspense about the traumatized Maryland cop taking a job as sheriff in rural Alaska where he falls for a lady pilot and solves an old murder. Enjoyably readable, particularly the extensive cast of townsfolk, alternately hilarious and sad and madcap. Though if it's specifically Alaska and its culture you want, I'd go for Dana Stabenow over this.

Content notes: Animal harm, depression.

Public Secrets

3/5. Tale spanning twenty years before and after the death of a rock star's kid, mostly orbiting his daughter as she grows up and begins to remember what she saw that night.

I picked this almost at random out of Roberts's vast catalog, assuming it would be a romance. This was a mistake because (1) it's mostly contemporary fiction; and (2) a baby boy dies, which was quite stressful and not the soothing bedtime reading I was shooting for. This is not a spoiler, btw – it's on the jacket copy. I was just tired and not paying attention.

Anyway, this is surprisingly rich with a huge cast of complex people. I have criticisms, like how everyone in the band ends up with a happy ending except for the queer guy, who gets – you guessed it – tragedy. But there's something compelling here. It's a soap opera that takes itself seriously enough to let you take it seriously.

Content notes: Child death, child abuse, rape, domestic violence.