Book: Under Currents
Author: Nora Roberts
Publisher: Piatkus
Pages: 464;
Price: Rs 699
I’ve been cheating...on books...with Netflix and it's ‘hot’ streaming service. Those stupidly addictive Korean and Chinese dramas have become a stress-buster for me and only increased the readers block that has become a kind of constant companion. But, like every year, there comes Nora Roberts with a new release, bringing me out from the reading slump. Take previous examples like Come Sundown, The Obsession, The Collector, etc, all have helped me tide over moments of low. This year’s Under Currents was no different.
Under Currents is set in the quite and beautiful town called Lakeview Terrace, which is also a home to the wonderful and glamorous Bigelow family. While on the exterior the Bigelow family looks quite the happy one, it is what goes behind close doors that unnerves you, once you cross the threshold of the beautiful house in Lakeview Terrace. Teenager Zane and his younger sister Britt are constantly abused — physically and emotionally — by their successful surgeon father, Dr Graham Bigelow. What the father does to the children breaks your heart when you read it, especially the part where he has no shame in wrongly putting his own son behind bars, or for threatening his own daughter with the most cruel punishment possible if she reveals the truth. And the mother is almost complacent in her husbands acts, almost drawing sadistic pleasure from all this. The only support they have in all this from their aunt, mother’s sister, who not only proves Zane’s innocence but also raises both the kids as her own.
When the story takes a leap and the grown up Zane, now a lawyer, comes back to the small town, he falls for the new entrant in the community, a landscape designer Darby, who has a violent past of her own. The second part also marks the entry of two characters from Zane and Darby’s life, threatening to destroy the life the two are building for themselves.
Under Currents is full of complex characters and emotions and Nora makes sure that you are with her till he last word on the last page by making the characters relatable, even though its the same old pattern of love story with a killer on the loose like most of her previous books (Carolina Moon, The Villa, True Betrayals, Angels Fall and most of her other books).
