Title: Hideaway
Author: Nora Roberts
Read copy: eBook (Kindle)
Published: May 26, 2020
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ASIN: B07WQHHQGM
Caitlyn Sullivan had come from a long line of Hollywood royalty, stretching back to her Irish immigrant great-grandfather. At nine, she was already a star—yet still an innocent child who loved to play hide and seek with her cousins at the family home in Big Sur. It was during one of those games that she disappeared.
Some may have considered her a pampered princess, but Cate was in fact a smart, scrappy fighter, and she managed to escape her abductors. Dillon Cooper was shocked to find the bloodied, exhausted girl huddled in his house—but when the teenager and his family heard her story they provided refuge, reuniting her with her loved ones.
Cate’s ordeal, though, was far from over. First came the discovery of a shocking betrayal that would send someone she’d trusted to prison. Then there were years spent away in western Ireland, peaceful and protected but with restlessness growing in her soul.
Finally, she would return to Los Angeles, gathering the courage to act again and get past the trauma that had derailed her life. What she didn’t yet know was that two seeds had been planted that long-ago night—one of a great love, and one of a terrible vengeance...
My rating:
When she was ten, Caitlyn Sullivan, the latest member of the Sullivans, the closest approximation to royalty in Hollywood, is kidnapped and held for ransom. But the resilient kid escapes her captors and finds refuge at a close-by ranch with the Coopers.
The shock of the kidnapping didn't have the time to subside, when the true depth of the betrayal is revealed...
The ordeal and the betrayal would end up shaping Cate's life for years, until she finally decides to stop reacting and take the reigns of her life.
But as she returns home and embraces her relationship with the man who found her huddling in his kitchen when he was a boy, a shadow from the past rears its head again and demands satisfaction.
This one started off strong with the kidnapping plot, the betrayal from within (though it was evident who the inside party was from the get-go), but the excitement soon fizzled as chapter after rather dull chapter recounted (in minute detail) Cate's life, her lingering fears due to the trauma, her quite frustrating inability to take a make a move of her own and actually doing something with her life without having her hovering family holding her hand.
When she finally did, it was already too late to make ma actually care and it was really Dillon and his family that saved the day in this one.
The suspense, so strong and intriguing at the beginning, took the backseat in this story. So much so, that everything was revealed and resolved in a little more than the chapter. It felt more like an addendum, something thrown in as an afterthought...Or maybe the book just ran too long and the editor decided to put his/her foot down at the wrong time and in the wrong place story-wise.
Too much meh and not enough whoa.
3 stars, contemporary, contemporary romance, Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb, suspense/mystery/adventure/thriller
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