Title: Under Currents
Author: Nora Roberts
Read copy: eBook (Kindle)
Published: July 9, 2019
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ASIN: B07JBQTL3W
Within the walls of a tasteful, perfectly kept house in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, young Zane Bigelow feels like a prisoner of war. Strangers—and even Zane’s own aunt across the lake—see his parents as a successful surgeon and his stylish wife, making appearances at their children’s ballet recitals and baseball games. Zane and his sister know the truth: There is something terribly wrong.
As his father’s violent, controlling rages—and his mother’s complicity—become more and more oppressive, Zane counts the years, months, days until he can escape. He looks out for little Britt, warning her Be smart. Be careful. In fear for his very life, he plays along with the insidious lie that everything is fine, while scribbling his real thoughts in a secret journal he must carefully hide away.
When one brutal, shattering night finally reveals cracks in the façade, Zane begins to understand that some people are willing to face the truth, even when it hurts. As he grows into manhood and builds a new kind of family, he will find that while the darkness of his past may always shadow him, it will also show him what is necessary for good to triumph—and give him strength to draw on when he once again must stand up and defend himself and the ones he loves...
My rating:
Zane Bigelow's life might have looked perfect on the outside, but he and his younger sister knew the truth. Knew the insidious undercurrents of rage and violence of his father and complicity by his mother. He thought he'd escape to college, but the day of reckoning came sooner and Zane only has his aunt, his neighbor and a determined cop to thank for believing him and saving him.
Eighteen years later, Zane returns to his hometown for good, deciding to spend his life as a small-town lawyer close to his family, but the undercurrents tend to come back. And this time with a vengeance. But Zane isn't a helpless, lonely teenager. He has a family now, a close-knit community at his back, and the love and protection of a strong woman with undercurrents of her own.
You cannot go wrong with a Nora Roberts title. She has this uncanny ability of painting a picture with her words that make you see the characters, the community and everything around them in living color. And she knows just how to lull you into a false sense of security, a calm before the storm, before deploying the big guns.
The story starts with fourteen-year-old Zane Bigelow getting his first "real" beating from his controlling father, and, knowing no one would take his word over the pillar of community that is his father, writes it all down in his journal. When shit hits the fan a few years later, those journals are the proof the cops need to make the case stick...and save Zane from prison.
The narration is chilling, painting a picture of twisted villainy and abuse with masterful strokes, keeping you turning the pages both fearing and wondering just what would happen next. And when that final chapter in this first part of the book rolls in, you breathe a big sigh of relief.
The story jumps eighteen years forward in time, when Darby McCray, a landscape artist who recently lost her mother, comes to Lakeview, North Carolina, in hopes of building a life there. Her entrance coincides with Zane's return from the big city and big career to settle back down in his hometown, where his family is. The two immediately hit it off, discovering a joined painful past, and as their romance blossoms and blooms, you can feel the undercurrents stirring, roiling, ready to bubble to the surface. Yet another calm before the storm.
When the first showdown was over with more than 12 chapter to go, I knew that couldn't be the end of the story, I just didn't expect the final twist. Even now, looking back, there was no real foreshadowing, or maybe I was just too concentrated on the obvious to look for the shadowy. I don't know and I don't really care, because out of the blue or not, I liked the added twist. Because you just don't expect it, at least not from that particular angle. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, yes, but I thought it would come from the foot of the same person, if you know what I mean.
The suspense was wonderfully done and woven into the story, perfectly balanced out by the blossoming romance between the two leads and the diverse cast of characters. What Nora Roberts also does well, beside the word-painting and suspense, are the characters and romance. The characters never feel like one-dimensional cardboard cutouts, but each one has specific quirks and traits that set them apart and give them that needed pinch of realism. As for the romance, it's always rather quick, but still organic, and written in such a way to make it rather unassuming and laidback compared to the suspense, but always believable and relatable.
This book was classic Nora Roberts and I loved every single page of it.
5 stars, contemporary, contemporary romance, favorites, Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb, suspense/mystery/adventure/thriller
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