How Do I Hate Thee, Nora Roberts? Let Me Count the Ways.

Secret Star by Nora Roberts was awful, awful, awful. What else can I say about this? Oh, yeah, it was awful. I'll warn you, I only made it 40 pages in, but that was plenty.

First off, the first 13 pages consist of a single character musing over a crime scene. The very first words in the story are a gushing half-page description of the portrait of Grace Fontaine, murder victim. Lieutenant Seth Buchanan, street-hardened detective, then gushes over Grace's house, her life (he is apparently familiar with the society pages of the Washington Post), and her men.

Then there’s a two-and-a-half page info-dump on the events of the previous novels in the series. Apparently, even an “as you know, Sam” (when one character explains something to another character that the listener should already know) is too subtle for Nora Roberts.

Okay, now for a full page of characterization for Sam. He’s cool. He’s calm. He’s “serve and protect” with a double helping of strong and silent. Is this really necessary? Do we have to sit down for a minute so Nora can tell us about Sam? Is it really that impossible to show him being all this stuff? Maybe even have him, oh, I don’t know, interact with some other characters?

He keeps wandering through the house gushing on about the woman’s silk nightgown and her haunting scent. There’s a little more tell-not-show characterization of Seth.

Grace has friends. We don’t get to meet them yet. Grace has clothes. We do get to meet them. We also get to meet her speakers, her books, and her fireplace. We get to speculate, gushingly, on how sexy her voice would have been. Seth can “almost taste” her “husky purr of a laugh.” For a man who, only seven pages earlier, was described as believing that “emotion…had no place in the job”, he sure is getting worked up over that sexy, sexy dead lady.

At least, Roberts does let us know that these imaginings are “uncharacteristic.” It’s good to know he doesn’t go around mentally whacking off to all murder scenes. And I suppose that that’s one of the conventions of romance novels—two people, never before touched in this way, throw aside their characteristic behavior to acknowledge the deep, destiny-laden pull between them. Ick.

Of course, someone that sexy can't actually be dead. Here she is, in the flesh, with all the things we just gushed over intact. Even the voice, which is just as Seth imagined it. Of course it is. And this not-dead innocent managed to pull up to her house, open the door, and draw a gun on the hardened cop without his noticing. Good for her.

At least now there are characters interacting. Good, right? No, not so good, because, for Nora Roberts, apparently, two characters equals head-hopping (that is, when the point of view changes more than once within a scene, a BIG no-no in writing).

It turns out that the dead lady is actually a cousin who tries her best to look like Grace because she wants to be her. Wait, the book opens with an identical non-twin, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Nora? Charles Dickens wants his staggering coincidence back.

Nora finally settles on Seth as the point of view character for the next scene and we get to meet Grace’s two friends. They quickly recap their stories from the previous books, complete with amnesia and mistaken identities. Oh, boy.

Seth decides it’s time to take Grace down to the station for questioning. Considering that there is a murder investigation in progress, this seems perfectly reasonable. Jack the bounty hunter threatens to beat him up for his lack of tact. This does not.

Do bounty hunters generally know anything about cops or investigations? Do they understand that murder investigations are important things? Who knows, but at that point I threw up my hands and gave up. Again. Forty pages in and I can’t take any more.

I looked this book up on Amazon, and it has four stars. I don’t get it.