Angel Falls
Nora Roberts
Putnam, Jul 2006, $25.95, 448 pp.
ISBN: 0399153721

Two years ago in a family owned Florida restaurant where Reece Gilmore worked as a chef, a group of killers went on a murdering frenzy leaving only one survivor whom the predators thought was dead too. Reece is heartbroken as she thought of the owners as family; she also received two bullets and she saw her best friend killed. Reece enters a psychiatric hospital for trauma treatment before leaving her past behind to seek some solace from her anxieties and fears.

Reece stops running when she reaches Angel Falls nestled in the Grand Teton Mountains of Wyoming where she begins to truly heal by accepting work as a cook at a diner her first cooking job since the lethal incident. When she goes hiking Reece sees through her binoculars a man kill a woman; she runs to find help and meets Brady a writer. By the time they get the sheriff to the crime scene, all traces of a homicide are gone. The sheriff does not believe Reece while someone tries to gaslight her into believing she is having a break down, which everyone except Brady assumes is true.

At first readers will lean towards the predominant opinion of the townsfolk that Reece is psychologically regressing and the incidents are not real except inside her mind. However, her spirit and refusal to back down assisted by Brady's belief soon begins to persuade the audience that maybe her paranoia is based on a genuine attempt to drive her insane. The readers' turnaround is why Nora Roberts is one of the best at writing romantic suspense as demonstrated once again with the exciting ANGEL FALLS. Nora Roberts is at her very best in this great thriller.

Harriet Klausner