The Obsession (edició 2017)

Naomi Bowes was only eleven years old when she followed her father out into the woods on a rainy night and discovered the terrible secret he was concealing in the root cellar. After she rescues Ashley, preventing her from becoming the next in a long line of victims, her life is upended. As always, Nora Roberts does a fabulous job examining the psychological impact on the family. What would it be like to live knowing you had a relative who has done unspeakable things? Some relatives react by pulling together. Others fall apart. This was my favorite section of the novel.

As with most of her romance novels, this is told across a long time span, decades actually, and we also see Naomi years later after she’s moved across the country from West Virginia, to Washington DC, to New York, to Washington State, and changed her name for a fresh start. But when women begin disappearing where she lives, Naomi wonders if the past may have caught up with her. I thought this was well written and kept me guessing all the way to the end. ( )

Nora Roberts has a way of bringing her characters to life like no other author I've read. The dialogue seems real and the emotions are spot on. She is also impeccable at research, giving her characters occupations and lifestyles that are true to real life. Her stories always manage to draw me in. I find myself reading so quickly, that the story is over before I want it to be. In The Obsession, twelve-year-old Naomi discovers that her father has been raping and murdering women in a cellar located in the woods near their home. When she saves Ashley from a similar fate and brings her to the police, her father is arrested and Naomi's world is changed forever. Paparazzi, a true crime book, and a movie make life impossible for Naomi and her family, so they move to New York. Naomi finds a career as a photographer and travels the world until she discovers a house near Seattle where she makes the decision to finally settle down. When she meets Xander and falls in love, Naomi thinks that maybe she has found what she has been searching for her entire life until women start turning up dead, and the nightmare her father brought her has a child seems to have returned to her life. I never tire of reading books by Nora Roberts, and I enjoyed this one a great deal. I'll be looking forward to her next story. ( )

Started out much better than some of her older reads, but turned back into her regular writings. It's a good easy read to pass the time. ( )

Nora Roberts tells a good story with clear characters. Naomi discovers that her father is a serial killer at the age of 12 years and this, not surprisingly, colours her future life. We meet Naomi as that 12 year old and then later in her life when, after being nomadic, she decides to settle in a beautiful old house that needs serious renovation by the lake and remote from a small town. This is a novel where everything is beautiful. Naomi's uncles, who bring her up, have fantastic taste. Naomi has superb taste in home furnishings too and is a brilliant cook and, of course, she is very striking to look at. Everyone she meets in the town is beautiful too and there is lashings more good taste. I kept reading, wanting to see it to the end but there were many things that didn't sit right in this complicated plot. ( )

The author knows how to write books where we get to know the character as a person. Naomi has a lot of trama from her past yet becomes a strong woman, not afraid to have sex with a man after knowing what her father did to women, willing to be on her own. Not reading a blurb about this book helped me enjoy the growth in Naomi learning to accept a house for herself, becoming an owner of a dog who was a wonderful character and having a boyfriend. He was over the top perfect: handsome, property owner, band member, handy worker, sympathetic. The decorating of the house took too much of the book (100 pages worth) After learning her father was still in jail, I figured out the ending but enjoyed her brother's help in solving it. Lots of details about thoughts of a serial killer. ( )