For the Love of Lilah by Nora Roberts

Narrated by Kate Rudd

For the Love of Lilah is the third of four Calhoun books written by Nora Roberts and which have all been recently released on audio. Each book charts the course of a romance for one of the four Calhoun sisters while the over-arching story arc which links the quartet is about a missing emerald necklace owned by Bianca Calhoun, the grandmother of the sisters. Bianca was married to a cold, hard-hearted man. She fell in love with an artist, Christian, and was about to run off with him. But then, for reasons which are not yet clear, she committed suicide by throwing herself out of a high window at The Towers, the Calhoun family property in Bar Harbor, Maine. Or at least that is what we’ve been told so far. I have my suspicions.

It is not necessary to have listened to the previous stories to understand this one as enough backstory is given to make the setting clear. Having read this one, I’m interested in the next (in particular) both because I want to find out about the mystery of Bianca’s death and also because, from what was hinted at in this book, the romance in the final story will be right up my alley. But, if you plan to listen to all of the books, perhaps skip the rest of the review because mild series spoilers will follow.

Lilah Calhoun is a naturalist at the local national park but she otherwise prefers inactivity to activity. She is excellent at napping and makes an art form of lazing about. She’s not lazy – but she likes to plan to do nothing where possible. She is also sexually forward and flirty and this often leads men to think she is freer with her body than she actually is.

There is a mild paranormal aspect to the story – the Calhoun women believe in tarot cards and séances and the like and Lilah gets “feelings” about people which are invariably correct. One night, following an impulse which was probably borne of one of these paranormal elements, she heads to the beach near her house. It is stormy and in a lightning flash she spies a man struggling to swim and in fact, in the process of drowning. She swims to his rescue and helps him make it to shore.

Max Quartermain is a history professor at Cornell University in New York. He was offered a dream job for the summer – collating and archiving a whole pile of family documents. The money is excellent and he hopes to take a year off from teaching and finally write his great American novel. What he doesn’t know is that his employer is a bad guy and the documents were stolen from the Calhouns (in the previous story *spoiler alert*). Said bad guy is a thief and he has developed an obsession with the Calhoun emeralds. There is a confrontation and Max ends up overboard with a bullet graze to his temple.

At first, I was expecting an amnesia plot and there is some temporary memory loss it is true, but this is not an amnesia story. What I liked about Max from the beginning is his honesty. When he remembers details, he shares them and because he has been taken in (in the good way) by the Calhouns and because he was taken in (in the bad way) by the villain, he wants to help the family. Also, he and Lilah are ferociously attracted to one another and any excuse for Max to stay is a good one in his book.

There are some “big misunderstandings” in the book (not my favourite trope) but for the most part, they weren’t left to linger and fester and I didn’t find myself too frustrated by them. There were a couple of things which were never addressed, to my dismay. One was that Max believes Lilah is a femme fatale and has men throwing themselves at her feet every day. What’s more, he believes she regularly takes them up on their sexual offers. That is not true but even if it was, it was unfair of Max to be so judgemental. In the end I felt it was glossed over and given that it was something that was very hurtful to Lilah, I was a bit disappointed by that.

The story is a little dated I think (Max has to have money wired to him in Maine – no ATM cards!) but I can’t necessarily put Max’s more alpha tendencies down to the age of the book. After all, there are plenty of alphaholes around nowadays too. There are times when Max’s efforts to protect Lilah are infantilising and Lilah gives him the set down he needs about it.

Kate Rudd is a narrator who has impressed me before and she did again here. In fact, I think she has improved her skills since I last listened to her perform.

Particularly wonderful was the way she gave a different voice to each of the main female characters – I could recognize the four sisters by ear, as well as Aunt Coco and Great Aunt Colleen. For the latter, it was partly about age and accent but not so for the sisters. To top it all off, the narrative portions of the book were in a different tone and so were the small portions, in first person, from Bianca’s perspective.

Ms. Rudd does a great male voice. Here, the differentiation was mainly by accent as the pitch was fairly uniform for the male characters but, again, I didn’t have any trouble working out who was who.

The production was smooth and crisp and Ms. Rudd delivered the emotions of the story without overplaying them. It’s a fairly simple tale and a relatively fast romance but I didn’t have any trouble suspending my disbelief and going along for the ride.

Kaetrin

Narration: A

Book Content: B

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence: Fighting

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

For the Love of Lilah was provided to AudioGals by Brilliance Audio for review.