Summer Reading

J. D. Robb

Nora Robert’s pseudonym for her In Death series, she has a prequel to one of the novels written as Nora Roberts, which is also a pseudonym by the way. Hot Rocks is a romantic suspense about the daughter of a con artist and thief who has never physically hurt his victims but joins with a sociopathic thief to pull off a diamond heist he can’t resist. The daughter has taken her stepfather’s name, owns an antique shop in a small town, finally putting down the roots she never had as a child, though not telling her new friends about the past that comes to haunt her as the diamond heist goes bad and the sociopath comes looking at her to find her father and his share of the diamonds.

A quarter of the diamonds are never recovered, which sets up the story for J. D. Robb’s novel Big Jack, the only In Death novel without the words in death as part of the title. It was first published as part of an anthology in Remember When, also the name of the store the daughter in the first book owned. Big Jack is about that daughter’s granddaughter some fifty years later. The granddaughter publishes the story of her grandparents, who met over the theft of the diamonds and fell in love.

In the first book, Jack is the daughter’s father. Someone believes his great granddaughter has more information on the diamonds than she reveals in her book and starts killing people who get in the way of finding that information. Eve Dallas, the In Death New York City police lieutenant who solves each murder of those novels, has to find the killer and the diamonds. Most of the villains in this series tend to be stereotypical. The villain in Big Jack has the best character build up, which makes him more believable and creepier.

Romance Novels on the Sweeter Side

Dark Harvest by Karen Harper is the second book in a trilogy about the Amish in Ohio and outsiders who become important to them. I haven’t read the first book. This one gives enough details to make clear what happened there. This story stands alone fine. A wounded female police officer goes undercover to find those responsible for hate crimes against the Amish community. Sort of a reverse Witness except the threat comes from the surrounding community. The characters are believable, the suspense keeps you reading. Only thing I didn’t like, and that tends to happen a lot in suspense novels, is the stupid mistakes the main character made as she investigated, used to set up following conflicts.

I very much like the voice of writer Barbara Bretton in Someone Like You, a novel strictly about relationships—parental, sibling, and love interests. No villains. Two sisters come to terms with parents who were ill equipped to parent and their own hang ups at committing to emotionally intimate relationships. Fun, somewhat snarky use of metaphors and well-developed characters you care about, though the men were on the too-good-to-be-true side. Good read.