From the publisher:
#1 New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts presents Legacy, a new novel of a mother and a daughter, of ambition and romance, and of a traumatic past reawakened by a terrifying threat…
Adrian Rizzo was seven when she met her father for the first time. That was the day he nearly killed her―before her mother, Lina, stepped in.
Soon after, Adrian was dropped off at her grandparents’ house in Maryland, where she spent a long summer drinking lemonade, playing with dogs, making a new best friend―and developing the stirrings of a crush on her friend’s ten-year-old brother. Lina, meanwhile, traveled the country promoting her fitness brand and turning it into a billion-dollar business. There was no point in dwelling on the past.
A decade later, Adrian has created her own line of yoga and workout videos, following in Lina’s footsteps but intent on maintaining creative control. And she’s just as cool-headed and ambitious as her mother. They aren’t close, but they’re cordial―as long as neither crosses the other.
But while Lina dismisses the death threats that Adrian starts getting as a routine part of her daughter’s growing celebrity, Adrian can’t help but find the vicious rhymes unsettling. Year after year, they keep arriving―the postmarks changing, but the menacing tone the same. They continue after she returns to Maryland and becomes reacquainted with Raylan, her childhood crush, all grown up and as gorgeously green-eyed as ever. Sometimes it even seems like the terrifying messages are indeed routine, like nothing will come of them. Until the murders start, and the escalation begins…
This book is a fine example of why Nora Roberts is still at the top of the bestseller lists. She writes a great story with interesting characters and really knows how to keep the reader turning pages. Between the family dynamics, the growing business, friendships, romance, and of course the crazy, threatening poems that show up annually, it was impossible to put this book down.
Lina, the mom, is the least developed character here but she is very much on the periphery. A career driven, super successful yoga megastar, she is not close with her daughter. In fact, the nanny and the grandparents are the ones who raise Adrian to be the mature, smart, sensible yet driven young woman she becomes. When she is forced to start a new high school, she decides to create her own exercise videos. She recruits a group of nerds, committing social suicide in the process, but she doesn’t care. She likes her new friends and they get her where she wants to be. Happily, she takes them along on her ride to success.
But success always has its downside. In Adrian’s case, it’s the threatening poems that follow her for years, until they finally start escalating. Her mother, always one to throw money at a problem, hires a private investigator since the FBI hasn’t really done anything over the years. Meanwhile, Adrian moves out of NY and in with her grandfather after her grandmother passes. They adopt a mountain of a dog from the pound, and Adrian finds she is very happy living in the small town where she spent her best times growing up. Her best friend still lives there, and her brother, Raylan of the beautiful green eyes, ends up moving back home. Adrian and Raylan are friendly, but that friendship turns to something deeper as they reconnect.
If you like a bit of suspense with your romance, this is your book. I have to say I pretty much figured out who the threat was early on, and it didn’t really matter. I still loved this story and these characters. They almost(!) tempted me into trying yoga again.
6/2021 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch
LEGACY by Nora Roberts. St. Martin’s Press (May 25, 2021). ISBN: 978-1250272935. 448 pages.
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