Nora Roberts is considered to be one of the foremost and most prolific romance novelists in America today. I’ve read about 2/3 Nora Roberts books before this and they seemed like good mind-fluff with their elements of romance and suspense so when I found this one at my local library I decided to give it a try.
The story deals with the Mercy family in Montana, a family which has been ranching for several years and the current pater familias is a mean, ole SOB called Jack Mercy. The story actually starts off with Jack’s death and the reading of his will. His will forces his 3 daughters Tess, Lily and Willa to stay on the ranch for a whole year or else the ranch will pass out of their hands into a charity organisation. The 3 sisters (or half-sisters) have never seen each other before, they’re all from different wives and are all completely different from each other. Tess is the glamorous script-writer from Hollywood, Lily is a meek teacher from the east coast while Willa is the one who has stayed on at the ranch and looks after the day-to-day operations at the ranch. Their love-interests are Nate, a lawyer cum rancher, Adam, Willa’s half brother and Ben, a neighboring rancher, respectively. After the will is read and the sisters move onto the ranch, a bunch of gruesome animal killings starts occurring at the ranch. After a ranchhand is killed in a similar manner, the number of murderous incidents rapidly escalate and everyone is spooked as to the identity of the killer. Who the killer is and will the sisters find true love and happiness form the remainder of the story.
The book is quite a long read, with the above events happening over the course of a whole year, the same year that the sisters are supposed to spend on the ranch. Like any good romance novel this one features almost every formula that women get dewy eyed about, there’s a wedding, a pregnancy, a baby, the strong but sensitive hunks and the attractive damsel(s) in distress. The admirable part about this book is, as anyone who has ever read a Nora Roberts will tell you, the amount of research that went into the book. The ranching operation is completely detailed according to season and there’s plenty of farming, calving, foaling etc etc throw in. So, if and only if, you are interested in reading about cowboys and their life, would this book ever be interesting, else it is a long plodding read through hundreds of pages of detail.
The romance is ok, I mean I wasnt drawn to any of the characters, Willa and Lily were just too boring and Tess just tried too hard. It is amusing that in order to create characters who would have nothing in common, she decided to go with women from the East Coast, West Coast and the Mid-West of America. As everyone knows, these three regions while being American could not be farther apart in ideas, lifestyles and culture. The major portion of the story deals with the time they spend bonding as sisters, but, all three fall in love with cowboys :D The idea was half-baked to say the least and it didnt endure the romance to me at all.
To compare Nora Roberts to a suspense writer (Anne Perry, PD James, Agatha Christie) is just not possible, the murders are there because the author wants them there. When the murderer is unmasked the motive is again a very cliched one. The murders take place over the course of the year and the list of suspects is really small, mainly limited to the people who live on two ranches. It is a stretch of the imagination to buy into the plot that the police are not able to solve the murders, even when the murderer uses the same knife each time. I mean how much of a problem is it to match knife wounds to knives. Also the police make a search of some location and fail to find blood-soaked rags which the main character is instantly able to find. All these little discrepancies, add to a very long boring read (have I said that enough already). So, basically read this book only if you are a die-hard Nora Roberts fan and like rural settings otherwise stick to some of her better books like The Villa, Birthright or The Three Fates.