Under Currents - Nora Roberts

Title: Under Currents
Author: Nora Roberts
Genre: Fiction, Suspense
Rating: 5/5
# pages: Audiobook 14.5hrs.
Date read: July, 2019

Zane Bigelow grew up in a beautiful, perfectly kept house in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. 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. Only Zane and his sister know the truth, until one brutal night finally reveals cracks in the facade, and Zane escapes for college without a thought of looking back...

Years later, Zane returns to his hometown determined to reconnect with the place and people that mean so much to him, despite the painful memories. As he resumes life in the colorful town, he meets a gifted landscape artist named Darby, who is on the run from ghosts of her own.

Together they will have to teach each other what it means to face the past, and stand up for the ones they love.


Alright, I'll state my biases right away - I love Nora Roberts' newer books, and though I can see that they're incredibly formulaic, I just don't care. I can see a book's weaknesses and love it anyway, and this was definitely the case here.

Because this? This was one of the most unputdownable books I've come across in a very long time, and reading it as an audiobook was a HUGE mistake. So big, in fact, that I ended up buying the ebook version as well, because I reached <big spoilerific turning point> right as I arrived somewhere where I couldn't listen to the audiobook any longer, and just HAD to know what happened next RIGHT NOW!!! ... and then relistened to it once I got back to the audiobook, because it was so satisfying that I just had to experience it once again :-D

In the end, I listened to 14.5hrs in 5 days.

I grew to care for all the main characters and really love how Nora Roberts writes little-town communities. Just like in "The Obsession" she ended up describing a place I'd like to live in myself, and though I know nothing about gardening myself, I loved reading about Darby's landscaping business and would DEFINITELY like to book her for my own garden!

The ending was perhaps a bit to quick (I would have liked more of a follow-up, though I do get how the characters getting closure meant they didn't need the follow-up themselves) and a bit too repetitive, and from a purely objective point of view should probably have subtracted a star... but it's a rare thing that I get this obsessed about finishing a book (yet don't want it to end at all!), so 5 stars it is.