Blue Smoke

Reena Hale learned at an early age what fire could do. She was a small child when she had to watch her family's' restaurant burn to the ground thus beginning her love/hate relationship with fire. As she grew up she devoured everything possible to expand her knowledge because she continued to be tortured to fire. In college, her boyfriend was burned to death, and this is just another event that directs her to her career as an arson investigator. Renna feels content with her life when she becomes a member of the police department, and buys her first home. She is surprised when she meets neighbor Bo Goodnight to find out he has been trying to find her since college. He saw her at a party across the room and has been trying to find her since. As they grow closer and fall in love, Renna is horrified when Bo's life is threatened again with fire. As they investigate further, it is revealed that two of her other boyfriends were touched by fire, and it is all perpetrated by the same person. I loved this story. It is definitely one of my favorite NR tales. The characters were phenomenal. Reena and Bo are a good match, but all the supporting characters were an important part - from her loud obnoxious loving family to the creepy villain.

Reena Hale learned at an early age what fire could do. She was a small child when she had to watch her family's' restaurant burn to the ground thus beginning her love/hate relationship with fire. As she grew up she devoured everything possible to expand her knowledge because she continued to be tortured to fire. In college, her boyfriend was burned to death, and this is just another event that directs her to her career as an arson investigator. Renna feels content with her life when she becomes a member of the police department, and buys her first home. She is surprised when she meets neighbor Bo Goodnight to find out he has been trying to find her since college. He saw her at a party across the room and has been trying to find her since. As they grow closer and fall in love, Renna is horrified when Bo's life is threatened again with fire. As they investigate further, it is revealed that two of her other boyfriends were touched by fire, and it is all perpetrated by the same person. I loved this story. It is definitely one of my favorite NR tales. The characters were phenomenal. Reena and Bo are a good match, but all the supporting characters were an important part - from her loud obnoxious loving family to the creepy villain.

Crime mystery / romance by the diva of this genre. Renna is from a close knit Italian-American family who own a pizzaria in a Baltimore neighborhood. Due to an arson fire at the restaurant when Renna was a child, she focuses her energy on studying to become an arson investigator. Through the years, there are other mysterious fires and the unsolved death of Renna's first love. Bo is a carpenter who had seen Renna several years before at a college party and considered her his "dream girl". Try as he may, he could never connect with her until many years later. The romance between Renna and Bo takes place during the increasingly blatant and more personal arson fires plaguing Renna. This is a pretty good and quick read that I enjoyed until the ending. After a fair amount of tension, the ending was a little rushed. The romance is a little predictable, but I would still have liked to see more of Renna and Bo.

BLUE SMOKE begins on the night Catarina Hale becomes a woman. Awoken by the unmistakable pains of female adolescence, Reena goes downstairs for a ginger ale in the late hours of an August night. When she steps outside for some fresh air, she notices a beautiful light coming from her family's pizza shop, Sirico's. What she at first believes to be a reflection of the streetlights in the windows of the shop turns out to be licking flames of orange fire. In the days that follow the fire, the arsonist responsible for the destruction of the restaurant is arrested, and the community covers the Hale family like a warm blanket during their trying times, working with them to rebuild Sirico's until the restaurant is even better than it was before. But 11-year-old Reena can't get the flames, the overwhelming heat and destructive power of the fire, out of her mind. She wants to study fires, to understand the arsonists who are obsessed with setting them. Years later, Reena is an arson investigator for the Baltimore Police Department. And while her professional life thrives and she has plenty of fires to study and arsonists to arrest, her personal life is less impressive. She has had a string of failed relationships, ones that ended in tragedy and violence, ones that simply ended, anticlimactically. And now, at 31, Reena has just bought her first home and is ready to welcome love into her life. It comes in the form of the man next door, a carpenter named Bowen Goodnight, who spotted Reena at a college party 13 years ago and has been enchanted with his "Dream Girl" ever since. But just when things couldn't get any better, they abruptly start to get much worse. Reena finds herself being courted by a psychotic killer, a pyromaniac and arsonist who has a personal vendetta against Reena and her family. And even more chilling is Reena's slow understanding that he has been stalking her for a long, long time, gradually getting closer and closer to exacting his revenge on her family for a long-ago event. And his next victim may be much closer to home: a member of her family, her new love...or Reena herself. Before reading BLUE SMOKE, I had only read one other Nora Roberts novel (NORTHERN LIGHTS) and no J.D. Robb books. After looking at the other reviews here, I think this was a distinct advantage for me when reading BLUE SMOKE. It seems that authors as prolific as Nora Roberts are often pigeonholed, expected to write certain ways and about certain topics; and if they waver from their usual course, it's to the detriment of their fans' enjoyment of the novel. Judging from the other reviews here, this is the case with BLUE SMOKE. It seems that the majority of Roberts' fans who have responded to the novel here are disappointed with this offering because it's not what they expected out of a Nora Roberts book; some have indicated that BLUE SMOKE is more like a J.D. Robb book, what with all the grisly description and gory detail. Since I am not really f

i don't understand where the "horror" of the previous reviews come from. unlike the NR romantic suspense, in this one i see crime novel. and an excellent one it is. yes, there is romance (and excellent it is too)but there is also the gritty who-done-it. i loved the book. the hero is so wonderfully into the heroine. the family is great. the relantionship between friends is great. my only problem is that the heroine didn't suspect who the bad guy was sooner. but that would have made for a shorter story. if you enjoy the "in death" series, i would highly recommend this book.