Sunday, September 24, 2006

Gotta love the crazies...

Title: Angels Fall
Author: Nora Roberts

This book is the latest by Nora - well, the latest stand-alone, since the first in a new trilogy came out last month.

But back to this story.

Reece limps into a small town in Wyoming in a car that essentially dies on Main Street. She's a bit of a loner, though a few of the townspeople immediately develop a soft spot for her.

She decides, within hours, that she'd like to stay there, and takes a job as a cook in a diner. As it turns out, she used to be a professional chef, and has all kinds of training from prestigious French schools and stuff, but she's on the run from her inner demons.

Those inner demons make her more than a little bit paranoid. But more on that later.

One day, while out hiking, she sees what looks like a man killing a woman in a clearing on the other side of a massive river. She runs back down the trail, freaking out, and fortuitously runs into Brody, a successful (and single!) author, who is, coincidentally, one of very few people who believes her story. Why is that? Because there's no body. No evidence of a crime. And she couldn't see the man clearly enough to identify him.

Suddenly, things start happening to Reece - things that she doesn't remember doing. Things are misplaced in her apartment. Strange messages written to herself on her mirrors. It's almost like someone's playing into her paranoia to make her doubt herself and leave town.

Oh, she's running across the country trying to find herself because she was the only survivor of a mass killing at her old restaurant, and they never found the killers. She spent a few months in an institution trying to deal with that.

And because of that, half the town thinks she's just nuts, while the other thinks something might actually be up.

Is there a killer? Who's the woman she thought she saw? Is she just nuts? Well, we know the general answers to all of those, since this is a romance novel. I'll just say it works out the way you think it will, though the killer might be a bit of a surprise (he/she was to me...).

Honestly, I think Nora's run out of ideas. She's written like 250 books. The first ones are a bit too eighties (gosh, I hope this ridiculously powerful man will rescue me from my secretariness...), but there's a good strong phase in the middle where I like the characters. The most recent 2 novels? Eh. (Last one was set in Alaska. Burnt-out cop. Don't remember much else.)

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posted by ket at 10:21 PM

2 Comments:

Blogger Kate said...

Wait, what? We no longer hope that a ridiculously powerful man will rescue us from our secretariness?

I'm so confused....

Does that 250 include the ones she's written as J.D. Robb?

I must admit to being disappointed by Nora - at least the Key Trilogy anyway. I mean, seriously, not to ruin my eventual post or anything, but WHO does a booty shake on the front porch to celebrate the purchase of a new house? Ack!

9/25/2006 10:13 AM  
Blogger reyn said...

Well, I certainly don't want to be rescued from my secretariness by a ridiculously powerful man.

Haven't we already heard about this Reece character somewhere?

9/25/2006 10:19 AM  

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