Hidden Nature by Nora Roberts

Hidden Nature by Nora Roberts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review!
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Natural Resources police officer, Sloan Cooper, and her partner had just taken down three men preying on hikers in the Western Maryland mountains. Driving back, she pulled in at a convenience store—and walked right into a robbery in progress. One gunshot from a jittery thief was about to change her world.

After being shocked back to life on the operating table, she has a long recovery ahead, so she moves back to her parents’ peaceful house in Heron’s Rest. As for the boyfriend who dumped her via text while she was in the hospital, good riddance.

She may be down, but she’s not out. So when a woman vanishes, leaving her car behind in a supermarket parking lot, Sloan searches online for similar cases. She finds them, spread across three states. Men and women, old and young—the missing seem to have nothing in common. And the abductions keep happening.

Luckily, the new man in her life shares her passion for solving this mystery. But it will take every ounce of endurance to get to the dark heart of this bizarre case—and she's willing to risk her life again if that's what it takes to stop the horror.
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I don't know that there is another writer out there that can do romantic suspense as well as Nora Roberts; she is truly a master at her craft. For the past several years, she has put out novels that have been among my favorite reads of the late spring season - Mind Games, Identity, Shelter in Place - and I expected Hidden Nature to be no different. While this was not my favorite of her offerings, I am happy to report that this is another solid suspense novel with a sweet love story and a fast-paced mystery that kept me engaged from the first page to the last.

Squeamish readers might find parts of this book a little unsettling...I myself am pretty hardy, and even I thought parts of it were pretty difficult to wrap my head around. The bad guys in this one were bad guys in a new-to-me way that was especially disturbing. However, that made it all the more satisfying when they got what was coming to them. This was nicely tempered by the lighter side of the story, which had Roberts's trademark tale of a romance (or two), a picturesque setting, and a vibrant cast of characters who it is a pleasure to come to know.

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