New books on the shelf

[scottishlass]

Red Lily, the long anticipated last part of the In The Garden trilogy came out on Friday and I got it on Saturday. So today I snatched it up and read it - my fingers and eyes just itched to get my hands on it.
Short summary:
In The Garden is a garden center, maintained by Roz Harper Ashby, a Southern belle of old blood - tough, sophisticated, and in her late 40's. Blue Dahlia, the first in the trilogy, tells the tale of Stella who after being a widow meets the second love of her life while working for Roz. A ghost disturbs the budding love between Stella and Logan and we only see glimpses of the ghost who sings lullabies to babies and young children.
In Black Rose we see Roz finding love with a genealogist who is hired to find the origins of the resident ghost of Harper House. Amelia as the ghost calls itself, gets more irratic and more violent, so Roz decides to get it out of the house, off her grounds. With the help of Dr Mitchell Carnegie, she tries to find out who Amelia is.
Now in the third part, Red Lily, we follow the love of Hayley, a young single mother who works In The Garden and is a cousin of Roz and her family. Again, the resident ghost plays pranks, and while it escalates in behaviour, we find out more of who this Amelia is, we see the love of Harper, Roz oldest son and gardener, and Hayley unfold.

So ... did I like it - well not as much as the first two parts. I thought Nora Roberts put too much emphasis on the blasted ghost. Of course it was a tragic tale, but hey I wanted to see these two young people, Hayley and Harper, realize that they have been in love since they first caught sight of each other, the slow budding of their love and eventually their marriage. Harper (who has a uncanny resemblance to Orlando Bloom in the book) and his continuation and deepening love for Lily, the little girl of Hayley's.
What I got was Hayley out of the blue coming on to Harper (it was explained as her being under the influence of Amelia) and then without further ado they end up in bed and Hayley pregnant again (despite contraceptives and NO MENTION of them being careless or a condom getting ripped or something).
I thought Roberts rushed this book. I missed the slow building of the climax both in the main plot (the love story) and the sub-plot (Amelia). It felt as if she ran out of ideas and just wrote something in there that any fledgling writer could have come up with. Jeesh, she even didn't shy away from procuring an ex-girl-friend of Harper's out of thin air to have a jealousy scene which had no point whatsoever for the continuation and development of the Hayley/Harper plot but for shitty Amelia. Then there was these scenes of Hayley being under the influence of Amelia and a) being mentally raped by Amelia as she finds herself as Amelia sleeping with Harper's great grand-father and b) morphing into Amelia while having sex with Harper (Dear Ms. Roberts, if this is something new - forget it. I already wrote something similar in my long Star Wars saga Denial Is Not Just A River On Yavin where Mara flashbacks to the rape of the Emperor while being with Luke).
Did I feel compassion for Amelia? Nope, not a thing. She was selfish, mean and crazy both alive and dead and she was far too much in the focus of this book. It really got onto my nerves. Besides, the way Hayley was described in the two earlier books, she was a no-nonsense kind of girl, a bit naive but not susceptible for being possessed.
All in all this is the second time Nora let me down. The last Eve Dallas book (written as JD Robb) already had a lot lacking but this time ... this book really let me down. A pity.