Black Hills by Nora Roberts (2009)

It look me a long time before I realized I had read this, but it must have been a while ago, and I had not recorded it in my blog. I chose this book, because it was set in the Black Hills of South Dakota, close to the region I was going to visit on my vacation.

This is Nora Roberts at her best. She gives us a glimpse into a profession - this time Lil Chance runs a wildlife refuge for mostly large cats that have been injured or are no longer wanted as pets. Her love interest Coop helps his grandparents take care of a horse farm that provide trail rides.

There is mystery - the young couple finds a dead body and ten years later stuff starts happening. We get a creepy bad guy and get to see his thinking as he warps his Native American ancestry. The mystery keeps the story suspenseful as the couple works through their differences.

Lil Chance and Coop Sullivan meet as kids when his parents send him to south Dakota to spend a summer while they try to work out their own relationship. Cooper, the city boy, is miserable until he finds Lily, who also like baseball and he learns to love horses. Over the years their friendship continues and grows. Then they separate to educate themselves and pursue their careers. Now when he returns to help his ailing grandfather, she is not sure she can trust him. I don't remember any of Roberts' books giving us that much background on her main characters. Plus there were other people around them we got to know fairly well - his grandparents, her parents, her colleagues. I enjoyed the side romance too.

The South Dakota setting was the main reason I picked up this book. I got a sense of the Black Hills and rural living, where Rapid City is the "big town."  And learned some more things about our wild cats.