Book Review: Mind Games by Nora Roberts

Mind Games
by Nora Roberts
May 21, 2024
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
ASIN: B0CGRYWVJD
ISBN: 9781250289698
As they do each June, the Foxes have driven the winding roads of Appalachia to drop off their children for a two-week stay at their grandmother’s. Here, twelve-year-old Thea can run free and breathe in the smells of pine and fresh bread and Grammie’s handmade candles. But as her parents head back to suburban Virginia, they have no idea they’re about to cross paths with a ticking time bomb.

Back in Kentucky, Thea and her grandmother Lucy both awaken from the same nightmare. And though the two have never discussed the special kind of sight they share, they know as soon as their tearful eyes meet that something terrible has happened.

The kids will be staying with Grammie now in Redbud Hollow, and thanks to Thea’s vision, their parents’ killer will spend his life in supermax. Over time, Thea will make friends, build a career, find love. But that ability to see into minds and souls still lurks within her, and though Grammie calls it a gift, it feels more like a curse—because the inmate who shattered her childhood has the same ability. Thea can hear his twisted thoughts and witness his evil acts from miles away. He knows it, and hungers for vengeance. A long, silent battle will be waged between them—and eventually bring them face to face, and head to head…

Amazon

Thea and Rem Fox’s parents are murdered in their Virginian home while the children are visiting their grandmother in Kentucky for two weeks. Thea saw it all in a dream, with her psychic abilities. The same dream Grammie Lucy awoke from. She tells the local police who call the Fredericksburg police investigating the murder and capture the killer at a motel. The man takes a plea and is imprisoned for life twice over. Thea and Rem grow up their grandmother’s charge. Things appear to be all right for them, except for a problem. The murderer is just like Thea--he is a mind reader too and why he saw her in the dream.

If you enjoy Stranger Things where Eleven can dream walk due to her psychic abilities and others like that, adding a thriller and love story to it, then Nora Roberts’ Mind Games might hit the sweet spot for you. I am not sure I cared for the part where it went more into Thea’s and Rem’s childhood—it could have added a bit more past that, but longer then it should have been. Maybe, if needed, flashbacks could have been sprinkled it when Thea is in college and as an adult.

I gave Mind Games 4 sheep.

 

 

 

Reviewed by Pamela K. Kinney

About the Author:
website
Nora Roberts is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 200 novels, including Shelter in Place, Year One, Come Sundown, and many more. She is also the author of the bestselling In Death series written under the pen name J.D. Robb. There are more than five hundred million copies of her books in print.

Book Review: Year One (Chronicles of The One #1) by Nora Roberts

Year One (Chronicles of The One #1)

by Nora Roberts
December 5th, 2017
Hardcover, 432 pages
St. Martin's Press
It began on New Year’s Eve.

The sickness came on suddenly, and spread quickly. The fear spread even faster. Within weeks, everything people counted on began to fail them. The electrical grid sputtered; law and government collapsed—and more than half of the world’s population was decimated.

Where there had been order, there was now chaos. And as the power of science and technology receded, magic rose up in its place. Some of it is good, like the witchcraft worked by Lana Bingham, practicing in the loft apartment she shares with her lover, Max. Some of it is unimaginably evil, and it can lurk anywhere, around a corner, in fetid tunnels beneath the river—or in the ones you know and love the most.

As word spreads that neither the immune nor the gifted are safe from the authorities who patrol the ravaged streets, and with nothing left to count on but each other, Lana and Max make their way out of a wrecked New York City. At the same time, other travelers are heading west too, into a new frontier. Chuck, a tech genius trying to hack his way through a world gone offline. Arlys, a journalist who has lost her audience but uses pen and paper to record the truth. Fred, her young colleague, possessed of burgeoning abilities and an optimism that seems out of place in this bleak landscape. And Rachel and Jonah, a resourceful doctor and a paramedic who fend off despair with their determination to keep a young mother and three infants in their care alive.

In a world of survivors where every stranger encountered could be either a savage or a savior, none of them knows exactly where they are heading, or why. But a purpose awaits them that will shape their lives and the lives of all those who remain.

The end has come. The beginning comes next.

Wow! I am amazed at how easy Nora Roberts crosses genres. I have read a fair amount of her books but this one embodies many storylines...Horror, fantasy, paranormal, suspense, romance...and does so with seamless effort. I was invested from page one, then addicted by the second chapter. I felt tinges of "The Stand", "Wayward Pines", "Blackout" and many great paranormal stories.

A devastating plague, caused by contamination of consecrated ground, affects the world's population and opens the gateway for paranormal powers to grow. We follow those that survived (both normal and magical ) and share in their fears, heartaches, and triumphs with bated breath and pounding hearts. They pick up the pieces of their lives and try to reestablish some semblance of society. Can they survive together? Given a chance to essentially start over. will the earth's population learn from the mistakes of the previous society? There will be a "One" to save humanity but how will people survive until that time comes?

I couldn't put this down and am devastated that the next installment in this trilogy is not available. No matter what genre of Nora Roberts' writings are your favorite, you must try this on for size. I guarantee you will not be disappointed and you will join me in the support group of "junkies waiting for the 'Year One' sequel".

Getting 5 "Doomed" sheep!

Jeanie G

About the Author:
website-FB-Pin
Nora Roberts was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, the youngest of five children. After a school career that included some time in Catholic school and the discipline of nuns, she married young and settled in Keedysville, Maryland.
She worked briefly as a legal secretary. “I could type fast but couldn’t spell, I was the worst legal secretary ever,” she says now. After her sons were born she stayed home and tried every craft that came along. A blizzard in February 1979 forced her hand to try another creative outlet. She was snowed in with a three and six year old with no kindergarten respite in sight and a dwindling supply of chocolate.
Born into a family of readers, Nora had never known a time that she wasn’t reading or making up stories. During the now-famous blizzard, she pulled out a pencil and notebook and began to write down one of those stories. It was there that a career was born. Several manuscripts and rejections later, her first book, Irish Thoroughbred, was published by Silhouette in 1981.

Nora met her second husband, Bruce Wilder, when she hired him to build bookshelves. They were married in July 1985. Since that time, they’ve expanded their home, traveled the world and opened a bookstore together.

Through the years, Nora has always been surrounded by men. Not only was she the youngest in her family, but she was also the only girl. She has raised two sons. Having spent her life surrounded by men, Ms. Roberts has a fairly good view of the workings of the male mind, which is a constant delight to her readers. It was, she’s been quoted as saying, a choice between figuring men out or running away screaming.
Nora is a member of several writers groups and has won countless awards from her colleagues and the publishing industry. Recently The New Yorker called her “America’s favorite novelist.”

Book Review: The Obsession by Nora Roberts

The Obsession
by Nora Roberts
April 12, 2016
Berkley
768 pages
The riveting new novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Liar.

“She stood in the deep, dark woods, breath shallow and cold prickling over her skin despite the hot, heavy air. She took a step back, then two, as the urge to run fell over her.”

Naomi Bowes lost her innocence the night she followed her father into the woods. In freeing the girl trapped in the root cellar, Naomi revealed the horrible extent of her father’s crimes and made him infamous. No matter how close she gets to happiness, she can’t outrun the sins of Thomas David Bowes.

Now a successful photographer living under the name Naomi Carson, she has found a place that calls to her, a rambling old house in need of repair, thousands of miles away from everything she’s ever known. Naomi wants to embrace the solitude, but the kindly residents of Sunrise Cove keep forcing her to open up—especially the determined Xander Keaton.

Naomi can feel her defenses failing, and knows that the connection her new life offers is something she’s always secretly craved. But the sins of her father can become an obsession, and, as she’s learned time and again, her past is never more than a nightmare away.

Naomi Bowes, as a child, saw her father  heading off into the woods one night. She follows him and he disappears, but she finds an abandoned cabin and what looks like a door in the earth. As it was almost her birthday and she thought that maybe her father was down there, putting together the bike she asked for her birthday. She opens it and goes down, even when she hears something whimpering. Instead of her father, she finds a naked college aged young woman, cut up, bruised, and tied up. She frees the woman and frightened, she leads the woman away from the root cellar and through the woods to the sheriff’s office in town. Because of that, her father is arrested as a serial killer.

Naomi, her brother, Mason, and their mother are taken by their mother’s brother, Seth and his partner, Harry,  to live in Washington D.C.. But the past catches up and they all move to New York City, where Harry opens a restaurant and the kids grow up, taking their mother’s maiden name. The last part of the romantic suspense happens when Naomi is grownup years later and a professional freelance photographer. She puts down roots in a small town in the state of Washington and buys a large house. Another serial killer who kills close to how her father did, begins to kidnap and kill women in the town. Meanwhile she and a local man, Xander, have this growing attraction neither can deny, no matter how they fight it.

Addictive. The scary suspense of The Obsession keeps your fingers turning the pages, while the passionate needs between the hero and heroine is the bright spot amidst all the darkness. Ms. Roberts definitely has another bestseller on her hands.

I give The Obsession 5 sheep





Pamela Kinney

About the Author:
website-FB-Pin
Nora Roberts was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, the youngest of five children. After a school career that included some time in Catholic school and the discipline of nuns, she married young and settled in Keedysville, Maryland.
She worked briefly as a legal secretary. “I could type fast but couldn’t spell, I was the worst legal secretary ever,” she says now. After her sons were born she stayed home and tried every craft that came along. A blizzard in February 1979 forced her hand to try another creative outlet. She was snowed in with a three and six year old with no kindergarten respite in sight and a dwindling supply of chocolate.
Born into a family of readers, Nora had never known a time that she wasn’t reading or making up stories. During the now-famous blizzard, she pulled out a pencil and notebook and began to write down one of those stories. It was there that a career was born. Several manuscripts and rejections later, her first book, Irish Thoroughbred, was published by Silhouette in 1981.

Nora met her second husband, Bruce Wilder, when she hired him to build bookshelves. They were married in July 1985. Since that time, they’ve expanded their home, traveled the world and opened a bookstore together.

Through the years, Nora has always been surrounded by men. Not only was she the youngest in her family, but she was also the only girl. She has raised two sons. Having spent her life surrounded by men, Ms. Roberts has a fairly good view of the workings of the male mind, which is a constant delight to her readers. It was, she’s been quoted as saying, a choice between figuring men out or running away screaming.
Nora is a member of several writers groups and has won countless awards from her colleagues and the publishing industry. Recently The New Yorker called her “America’s favorite novelist.”

'Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn- part 1' giveaway!!!!

'Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn- Part 1' GIVEAWAY BABY!!!!

That's right you vampy lovers the Twilight Saga continues November 18th with a wedding to remember! *throws rice in the air* Bella and Edward are tying the knot and getting a little hot and heavy on Esme Isle. (Brown chicken, brown cow!) So to celebrate the event we decided to do a little romantic giveaway.

I'm going to open a second prize pack for International followers which will have some fun Sheep swag items.

Check out all the goodies below!

Prize Pack (For US Only)

5 Books

Nora Roberts- Worth the Risk

Nora Roberts- Night Tale: Night Shade and Night Moves

Nora Roberts- Night Tale: Nightshade and Night Smoke

J.R. Ward- An Unforgettable Lady

Alexandra Hawkins- Till Dawn with the Devil

'I love Vampires' sticky note pad

Ring Pop

'Lotto for Lovers' game

Rose petal bath soap

In the comments make sure to enter ALL the info listed below and followers of our blog will get double entries!

1. Your Email Address

2. Are you US or International?

3. If you could go anywhere, real or fantasy, for your honeymoon where would you go?

Contest ends November 6th at midnight.

Good luck!

And don't forget to enter the Spooktacular Giveaway Hop going until the 31st! Enter HERE.