One night changes everything in The Obsession by Nora Roberts (The Liar), a romantic suspense novel that opens with a horrifying scene. Naomi Bowes, an innocent 12-year-old from West Virginia, awakens on a stormy summer night, unable to sleep. When she sees shadows in the woods and spies her father, she secretly follows him to a grisly crime scene: a girl--bound, tortured and raped--trapped in a root cellar. After her father departs, Naomi rescues the injured girl and brings her to safety--and discovers that her overbearing father, a church deacon, is actually a demented serial killer. Naomi is instrumental in her father being sent to prison for life.
Seventeen years later, Naomi lives in Sunrise Cove, a peaceful, tight-knit community in Washington State, and has reinvented herself as Naomi Carson. She is a successful fine art photographer who thinks she's finally found a place to call home, though she is a loner who has problems trusting others and chronic nightmares. She buys and begins a major renovation on a 10-bedroom house, makes friends, adopts a dog and even falls in love. But when a series of brutal killings plague the area, Naomi's past is suddenly resurrected--as are her fears.
This spellbinding, well-constructed story plunges deep into the nature of obsession--Naomi's brother, an FBI agent desperate to understand his imprisoned father's twisted mind; and a vicious serial killer intent on striking again--and damage to the soul and psyche of a haunted woman. Roberts creates a strong, determined protagonist with whom readers can identify and empathize. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines