The Liar

PLEASE RESEARCH YOUR SETTING! I love Nora Roberts books, normally… but the whole time I read this one all I did was try and catch errors in the setting. As East Tennessean, the setting was what drove me to purchase this book (for $12 I might add). The setting was a fictitious town of Rendezvous Ridge near the Gatlinburg/ Maryville area. When Arlo (if that was his name) was arrested, the sheriff said he would be going to Bledsoe Co jail…well thats 108 MILES AWAY! I have never been arrested but I think that usually you go to jail in the same county in which you were arrested. In this story would have been either Blount or Sevier, since that is were you wanted us to believe that story was taking place. Also, there were several times in the story were the characters were running to Memphis (or in Bitsy case just returning), that is about 400 miles ACROSS the state. I have it very unlikely that Bitsy would have missed the welcome home party because she was in Memphis the previous evening at a wedding, but back home before lunch…again 400 MILES AWAY! The wealthy in East TN don’t go to Memphis to shop for the weekend like the antagonist was planning…they go to Atlanta because is it much closer and safer. Either the author (or someone who was pretending to be Nora Roberts) only knows two places in Tennessee, Gatlinburg and Memphis, or she just plain did not care to get it right. If you are going to use real towns in the story please have some clue what you are writing about, otherwise just leave those details out of the story. They neither added to nor would they have taken away from the plot or character development. All they did was point out your mistakes.
Bless your heart!

When I first read what the book was to be about I thought this sounded like a great plot. And it was. But I have to admit that pretty early on I figured out what was going to happen in the end. Putting that aside, I still would’ve really enjoyed the book but I’m put off by a lot of foul language in a book and this one certainly had its share. There were several things casually mentioned in the book that most certainly did not add anything to the story, at all, that I found to be very distasteful. Almost got the feeling we were just trying to be politically correct. And a Mom pushing her daughter to sleep with a man she barely knows after she’s just come out of a hellacious relationship just doesn’t make sense to me. Gave me the impression Mom wasn’t too smart. And I have to admit, I think a woman can be strong without losing her temper and punching someone in the face. Seemed a little silly to me. My first Nora Roberts read…and my last. You can tell a story, a good one, without all this mess.

My first Nora Roberts book was ‘Hidden Riches’ and I was hooked from that point! However, over the past few years, I have found that Ms Roberts’ books seemed to have lost some measure of whatever it was that made me love her characters and story lines. I have passed on reading her latest ‘witch’ trilogy, because it got such negative reviews, and it sounded like a poor man’s version of her earlier fantasy fiction series. NR’s latest stand alone novels and her most recent ‘In Death’ books have also been disappointing reads, so I really hesitated before purchasing ‘The Liar.’

‘The Liar’ is not a bad book. However, it reads more like the Harlequin novels that NR wrote in the past. There are the standard NR phrases that she uses in every book. For example, her characters never remain angry, but they hold on to their ‘mad.’ It’s never rain, but ‘the wet.’ There are a lot of flower, food, furniture descriptions, a prerequisite for any NR novel. I have noticed that the author generally creates one of two types of female characters in her novels, the strong, ball buster independent career woman, or the passive, weak male dominated woman. In ‘The Liar’ we meet Shelby Foxworth, the latter type, recently widowed, and doing her best to pay down her late husband’s debts, while bringing her daughter back to her hometown to start a new life. The plot is slow moving, the romance between Shelby and Griffin is slow and sweet, lacking real sparks, and the suspense is really non-existent.

So many reviewers seem to love anything that Nora Roberts writes, and I truly wish that I could be one of those reviewers. I feel sad that ‘The Liar’ is just the most recent disappointment from an author I used to love. I judge the quality of a book by how badly I want to do a reread, but this book is one that I will definitely not be reading again.

The plot for this was good, but was way too long. too much repetition. i almost stopped reading after the first 3 or 4 chapters. it went on and on too much about how big her debt was and detailed it over and over. i wanted to scream that this wasn’t even her debt. she continued to pay on it even after it was proven she wasn’t married to the guy and he was a con man. this equates to continuing to pay the guy that is spamming you on the phone after you’ve turned him into the police for spamming you. it was just boring having her list her debt over and over again. way too much foul language also. a couple of times, or mild language not bad… but suddenly halfway through the book, it was as if she realized she hadn’t used her quota of the f word and went crazy with it. even after knowing she was spyed on having sex twice, it didn’t seem to upset her or freak her out. that is just a little creepy. 300 pages would have made the book so much better than 500. went on way too long. i just wanted it to be over. that all being said… i did think it was a good plot and i enjoyed the characters. i figured out what was going to happen about 1/4 the way into the book, but was still a good premise.

SPOILERS: This is one of those books where you can pretty much guess how the plot will pan out as soon as you begin reading. Shelby, a beautiful, twenty-something red-head, has recently been widowed and soon finds out that her late husband was not quite the successful businessman she thought. Her life of designer dresses and private planes has been funded entirely by crime My main issue with The Liar is how thinly drawn out the Liar, aka Richard is. We don’t get any sense of why Shelby fell for him in the first place. Cally, their daughter, doesn’t seem to miss her dad at all and easily transfers her affections to the next man she meets, a bit like her mother. Personally, if a man I’d just met asked if he could take my four year old out on a “date” I’d be taking out a restraining order. Also, why would Shelby be liable for Richard’s debts when it turns out that their marriage wasn’t even legal?
Shelby returns to her family and home town with her tiny daughter in tow and falls in love with the first handsome man she meets. The whole book is one huge, if readable cliche. It is written in the style of a Hallmark movie and if it were on TV I would probably watch it. A decent,, undemanding summer holiday read.

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