Saturday, February 20, 2010

Night Tales by Nora Roberts (2010)

I forget that the short Silhouette books are just not as good. These two reprints are more along the lines of JD Robb, with much more murder mystery or cop thriller in them. These are also tied, about two sisters Cilla and Deb, whose parents are killed when they are young - mom a cop, dad was just there at the wrong time. They both fall in love with these macho cop type guys, who also happen to be rich.

Night Shift (1990)
One of these days I will have to make a spreadsheet of all of the professions of Nora Roberts' heroines, because she does cover quite a range, and gives some insight into the job of each. Cilla is a radio DJ in 'denver into rock and roll, also putting her little sister through college. Cilla starts getting threatening phone calls during her call-in radio hour, and is assigned Boyd, a laid-back cowboy of a cop. Cilla has a sexy voice and is better at relating to people over the airwaves that face to face. I liked that Cilla smokes and Boyd has just kicked the habit. I like that Roberts addresses the fact that some people have lousy first experiences with love making and don't know how to enjoy it until someone teaches them otherwise. All in all, this one was OK, though I wasn't quite looking for the creepy stalker piece and I don't see why Boyd had to inherit wealth from a grandmother and be from an extremely rich family.

Night Shadow (1991)
Deborah is the little sister that has gotten her law degree and is now a D.A. in Urbana, which I am assuming is the one in Illinois, though there was very little other descriptive stuff to place the town. OK, so Deb is brilliant and gorgeous, but also amazingly stupid. I understand people wanting to take walks in the night, but apparently she is taking them in unsafe neighborhoods and going after bad guys without telling anyone where she is going. I don't care how confident a woman is, this is just plain stupid. And it is not like she is a great karate expert or carrying a weapon she knows how to use. OK, so she is going after bad guys, and her witnesses get killed, and she is following leads, and when she gets in a pickle in the middle of the night she is saved by Nemesis- a masked stranger, who is the town's vigilante. She also meets rich guy Gage, who takes an interest in her. You know the story - they work together to find the bad guys and fall in love in the process with a few bumps along the way. But this story did bother me. First of all, Nemesis has a magical aspect to him - he can disappear. In this otherwise logical world, not only does his body disappear, but this power extends to the clothes he is wearing, which seems too much for me. Then this Gage guy is extremely rich again, and the explanation on his wealth doesn't sit well with me. He is orphaned, raised by aunt and uncle, he chooses to be a cop, he and his buddy go undercover, his buddy is killed and he gets seriously injured and is a coma for quite a while. When he wakes up and rehabs, he finds he can disappear (weird, but OK), and that his aunt and uncle have died and left him quite a bit of money. Then in four years he multiplies that wealth many times over, buys up half the town, lives in incredible, tastefully decorated house, learns Roarke style computer skills, and searches for the real man behind the drug deals and his partner's killer. Sorry, too much there for me. Also, when Eve Dallas and Roarke use computers to find something, there is some explanation on what they are looking for. I could not follow the logic of what Gage and Deb were searching for to solve their mystery.

Enough griping. It was a needed break between work and Latvian stuff.

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