Carolina Moon

By Nora Roberts.

I wanted to read this one for years after reading the analysis of it in Writing the Breakout Novel. However , upon reading it...I  spotted a few flaws.

Victoria (Tory) Bodeen originally was from a small town called Progress, where she was born psychic (more of a post-cognitive sort than a precog), to a religious nutter abusive father and a doormat mother. Her one happy period of life was being friends with Hope Lavelle, daughter of the richest family in town who liked adventure as much as she did. However, one night Hope is raped and murdered in the woods. Tory was supposed to be there that night, but her dad had beat the crap out of her instead. And Tory psychically saw the whole thing and knew where Hope's body was.

18 years later, Tory returns to Progress, even moving back into her old house, to start an upscale store and to confront her demons. She gets insta-involved (pretty much) with Hope's brother Cade, and even starts getting friendly with Hope's prickly twin, Faith. The Lavelle kids's mother, on the other hand, is not too pleased. Nor is whoever the heck killed Hope, as he's continued to rape and kill a blonde of the right age (i.e. however old Hope would have been at the time) every August, and he seems to be lurking in the woods stalking Tory.

It's not a bad book, but there's some plot holes that bug me (see spoiler cut below). Cade pretty much comes off as Generic Perfect Man, with no major character quirks, which bugged me. Especially when you compare him to Faith, who is incredibly attitudinal and dramatic and slutty and amusing and I adored her. Every time she's on stage, things get fun. She's the best part of the book, and I enjoyed her relationship with Wade, Tory, and her dog.  I think this is more of a character study than a mystery, though- or at least, the mystery isn't too well plotted out.

I'll give it three and a half stars, the half mainly being because of Faith. Spoilers below.   

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Problem #1: If you have an abusive father, who you KNOW has been known to track you down, smack you around, and take your money, why on earth would you tell your spineless doormat mother who does whatever hubby says WHERE YOU'RE LIVING AND HOW TO FIND YOU? I cannot conceive of why Tory would do something this incredibly dangerous and dumb. I'm sure Evil Daddy could have tracked her down if he wanted to on his own without having Tory shoot herself in the nearest foot.

Problem #2: Why doesn't it ever occur to anyone that had Evil Daddy really killed his wife, he wouldn't have shot her? He was a hands-on abuser. He ENJOYED hands-on. He wouldn't have quickly shot her- he would have taken his time and enjoyed the torture.

Problem #3: If the rapist/killer is so obsessed with Hope, that every other kill he's done wasn't quite up to snuff because they didn't have Hope's face...why on earth doesn't he oh, GO AFTER HER IDENTICAL TWIN SISTER AT ANY POINT IN TIME?! This doesn't make any kind of sense for him not to do it. Faith should be in as much danger as Tory is, even if she isn't hanging around Tory at the time.

Problem #4: For a whodunit, we have very few people to suspect. Clearly, Evil Daddy loves to manhandle women and he's evil and he'd make a good candidate as the original killer. But we've all read these sorts of books before and we KNOW the really, really, really obvious suspect isn't going to be the guy.
That leaves...well, let's just say I pretty much figured out who the killer was going to be really early on, because there weren't a whole lot of other suspects around. If you rule out anyone in the Lavelle/Mooney/Bodeen families (which you pretty obviously have to after awhile), who's left? Um, yeah. I really wish Nora Roberts had thrown in a few more suspicious red herring sorts about so it wasn't so obvious as to "well, he's left, he must be the killer."

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[Jordan Flipsyde]

When the love letter, do you still remember? The plot of the story is me!!!!!