Two By Nora Roberts

Psycho Alert

Two of Nora Roberts books have psychopathic villains—the kind with dangerously devious minds and the means to wreak havoc.

The gun control debate in the US comes up every time there is a mass shooting. In Nora Roberts’s Shelter in Place, three young men enter a mall in Portland, and start firing randomly. Many people are killed, and some in moments of heroism that automatically emerge when there’s a crisis, manage to save lives.

Simone Knox, who just happened to go out of the movie theatre to the washroom when the attacks took place, manages to call the emergency number 911, for which she is hailed as a heroine—without her presence of mind, more lives would have been lost.  Knox loses one of her best friends, and suffers from survivor’s guilt, leading her to go live on Tranquility Island, with her bohemian grandmother, CiCi, who is an artist, and seek solace in clay art herself.

Another survivor, Reed Quartermaine, befriends a young cop, Essie McVee, who had shot one of the killers, and becomes a cop too. All of them try to cope with the nightmarish memories, when suddenly, someone starts to target the survivors and kills them in horrible ways. The murderer, an expert with disguises and fake ids, stays several steps ahead of the cops; only Reed sees the connection, between the mall massacre in the past, and the current spate of killings. The novel is part thriller, part romance and very readable.

Shelter In Place

By Nora Roberts

Publisher: St. Martin's

Pages: 448

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Come Sundown by Nora Roberts takes a germ of an idea from Emma Donoghue terrifying Room, in which a man abducts a young woman and imprisons her in a basement.

Alice Bodine, a rebellious young woman, on her way home, is kidnapped by a religious psychopath, who shackles her in a room, beats and rapes her and takes away the children she gives birth to. He forces Alice to call him “Sir” and believes a woman’s place is to serve men and give him sons. Alice is so brutalized that she loses her sanity.

The discomfiting horror of Alice’s plight, is juxtaposed with the life of ambitious Bodine Longbow, who runs her family’s Montana resort and has made a success of it. Her father and brothers run a ranch and they all live happily in a close-knit family, with grandmother and great grandmother around.  Bodine is even happier when her childhood crush Callen Skinner, returns to town and starts working with the family enterprise.

Then, two women are found murdered on ranch property and a vengeful cop tries to pin the blame on Callen. But that is the least of the family’s problems—a mentally traumatized and severely battered Alice is found on the road, and getting her back to normal is a challenge.

Callen and his beloved horse Sundown are shot at, and suddenly the Longbows have more problems than they are used to dealing with.

Roberts successful thriller-romance formula seems to work quite well here too, even though many readers could be put off by the violence inflicted on Alice. There is also some kind of judgment here, unintended though it may be-- women who don’t stay within the protective ring of their families, are risking Alice’s fate.

Come Sundown

By Nora Roberts

Publisher: St Martin’s

Pages: 480