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Blue Smoke
Reena Hale’s destiny was shaped in the destructive—yet fascinatingly beautiful—fire that leveled her family’s pizzeria when she was young. Now an arson investigator, she finds her strength and wits constantly tested, although sometimes the job seems like a snap compared to her love life. But she can’t always blame the men. After all, a soot-caked woman barking orders and smelling of smoke isn’t the biggest turn-on in the world. Then she meets Bo Goodnight, who seems different. He’s been trying to find Reena for years, and now that she’s close enough to touch, he has no intention of letting go.
Nor does the man who has begun to haunt Reena’s life—with taunting phone calls and a string of horrifying crimes. And as Reena tries desperately to trace the origins—of the calls, the fires, the hatred aimed in her direction—she will step into the worst inferno she has ever faced...
Nor does the man who has begun to haunt Reena’s life—with taunting phone calls and a string of horrifying crimes. And as Reena tries desperately to trace the origins—of the calls, the fires, the hatred aimed in her direction—she will step into the worst inferno she has ever faced...
464 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published October 4, 2005
2227 people are currently reading
9295 people want to read
About the author
Nora Roberts
1,209 books59.7k followersNora Roberts is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 200 novels, including Hideaway, Under Currents, Come Sundown, The Awakening, Legacy, and coming in November 2021 -- The Becoming -- the second book in The Dragon Heart Legacy. She is also the author of the futuristic suspense In Death series written under the pen name J.D. Robb. There are more than 500 million copies of her books in print.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,357 reviews
April 30, 2016
“Why couldn't the merciful God turn down the sunlight so it wasn't blasting like a red furnace against his aching eyes? Because he'd worshipped the god of beer, thats why. He'd broken a commandment and worshipped the false and foamy god of beer. And now he was being punished.”
I think one of the main reasons I like these Nora Robert's books is that her heroines are smart, independent and strong. The heroes are down to earth and likeable.
Catarina (Reena) came from an Italian family. So plenty of talk about wine, pizza, antipasto.
He was a fucking cobra,
just as patient, just as lethal.
Bad guy was a sick fucker.
Read
July 27, 2025Another from the archives.
Blue Smoke was my first foray into the world of Romantic Suspense, and it threw me a bit of a curve ball. I’ve said before that reading genre fiction is, in part, a process of habituation. You gradually get used to certain signs, signifiers and conventions which allow you to get – for want of a better term – on the same page as the author. And until you do get used to the conventions of a genre, you tend to spend a lot of time saying things like “why are there twenty made up words in the first paragraph of this book about spaceships?” or “why has nothing been resolved three pages from the end of this book about wizards?”.
I’ve been doing the Romance Thing for a good few months now and I’m slowly getting used to some of the major conventions of the genre – I’m a lot less thrown now when random dudes start fixating on women they’ve hardly met, or when a completely ordinary guy with a white collar job takes his shirt off to reveal perfectly sculpted abs and biceps thicker than my waist (I mean, I’m not confused when it happens in a book I’m reading – I’d be pretty confused if it happened, like, at work or something). And I’ve always been familiar with the conventions of secondary-world fiction, so paranormals and the like have always been fairly easy for me to get my head around.
But I don’t read thrillers. Okay, I tell a lie, I think I’ve read two in my life, and one of those was a Dan Brown. This meant that Blue Smoke was, for me, a mashup of tropes from two different genres neither of which I’m really familiar with.
As always, this is a discussion as much as a review, so we’re about to set sail on the good ship spoiler. And again I should probably say that since this is, y’know, suspense that spoilers might make quite a big difference to your reading.
One of the things I’d got used to in my romance reading thus far was the central relationship being set up early – in most of the books I’ve read the hero and heroine have met by chapter three at the latest. I was a bit disconcerted, therefore, when I found myself 10% of the way into Blue Smoke and the heroine had not only failed to meet the hero, but had also failed to get past the age of eleven. Nearly the whole first half of the book was set five years or more before the “present day” of the story, setting up the heroine’s background, her circumstances, and her relationships with her family, with men, and with fire. I should stress that this isn’t a criticism – I understand why this stuff needed to be established – it’s just very much not the kind of structure I was used to seeing from the genre.
Anyway, our heroine is Reena Hale – an Irish-Italian-American arson investigator, who chose her career at the age of eleven when her parents’ pizza restaurant was burned down by an irate neighbour. A tiny, pedantic part of me is a little tired of trauma-induced-career-choice as a trope, on grounds of plausibility if nothing else. I might be completely misinformed here, but I understand that most degree programs really don’t want to be told that you’re only studying the subject because you were in some way personally affected by it. When Reena is eighteen a mysterious pyromaniacal psychopath burns her boyfriend to death, making it look like an accident, and when she’s twenty-something the same psychopath murders her next boyfriend and lights up the body. In her late twenties, the psycho visits her again just as she’s breaking up with an abusive, controlling asshole – this time torching said asshole’s car and trying to pin it on Reena.
This picaresque tour of Reena’s fire-damaged love-life is interspersed with scenes from the viewpoint of our hero Bo who, having seen Reena for literally seconds across a crowded party in 1992 has been fantasising about her ever since. It is, I think, testimony to the quality of the book and the handling of Bo’s character that this does not make him come across as an irredeemable nutcase. The action finally catches up with the present day (2005) when Reena buys a house that just happens to be next door to Bo, and at exactly the same time the mysterious psychopath comes back to burn everything the hell to the ground.
As I have already intimated, I made some basic genre errors reading Blue Smoke. My first mistake was assuming that it would start with an adult heroine and make her relationship with the hero the primary focus, rather than starting with the heroine at the age of eleven and making – in a way – her unwitting relationship with the villain (and with fire itself) the primary pillar of the narrative. My second mistake was reading the book as a mystery when it’s actually a thriller.
I should probably stress that I’m even more out of my depth talking about subgenres in Crime than I am talking about subgenres in Romance, so this may be complete nonsense. The distinction I’m trying to draw is between a story in which the primary narrative tension comes from uncertainty about what is happening and who is causing it (a mystery) and one in which the primary narrative tension comes from what is going to happen next (a thriller). Obviously subgenre conventions are a lot more complicated than that in real life (Hammett, for example, wrote stories in which it wasn’t clear what was happening, or what would happen next), but a defining feature of what I’m calling a “mystery” is the invitation to the reader to play along at home, to try to work out what the “answer” is before the protagonists do.
Because I read most of Blue Smoke as a mystery, I spent at least half of the book assuming that the misogynistic, Reena-obsessed serial killer was going to turn out not to be the transparently sociopathic kid from the first chapter who killed his own dog and left its burning corpse on Reena’s doorstep, because that would surely have been too obvious. Instead I managed to convince myself that he would turn out to be the kindly fire investigator who takes Reena under his wing at the start of the book. This meant that I spent about a quarter of the book fighting a kind of weird cognitive dissonance, as my thought process went something like this:
Hey, she’s mentioned that the kid over the road is staring at their burning restaurant with a crazy look in his eyes. That’s clearly a red herring. Hey, now the kid has left a burning dog corpse on her doorstep. Clearly another red herring. Hey, now somebody’s murdered her boyfriend but I am so clever that I have spotted the subtle clues – the killer was clearly somebody who looked respectable enough to get this guy to let his guard down, and he clearly knew about the way fires spread and the way they were investigated, so clearly it’s the fire-investigator guy. Okay, now she’s realised that somebody’s after her, okay, now she’s going over the possible suspects – and now she’s decided it’s probably psycho-dog-burning-kid which means we’re just about ready to set up for the big revelation that it isn’t. Which should be coming about now. Right about now. Hey, I’m kind of at the 90% mark here and she still thinks it’s the dog-burning-kid, it’s getting kind of late in the day for a major plot twist. Oh, she’s finally confronted the guy. Oh…
It probably says something about my tendency to overthink things that the most surprising plot twist I’ve encountered in a book this year was when the killer turned out to be the guy it was clearly set up to be from the start.
Despite my confusion, the suspense plot in Blue Smoke worked pretty well for me. The resident psychopath was sufficiently psychopathic that I kept reading to find out what he’d burn down next, and sufficiently horrible that I wanted to see him get his at the end. The romance plot felt a little secondary to me, but I’m not sure that was a problem in and of itself and I suspect that part of the reason it felt so secondary was that it was well enough integrated into the suspense plot that it didn’t intrude. Besides, when an evil madman is trying to burn everybody you care about to death your love life naturally takes a bit of a back seat.
The other thing I found a little surprising about Blue Smoke was how well I responded to its core ideas about family, despite their being rather more conservative than I’d usually find comfortable. A massive central theme of the book is the overwhelming importance of a very traditional marriage-and-kids based family life. The heroine’s family is basically the most important thing in her world, the villain’s raging psychosis is frequently shown to stem from his growing up in an unstable family (and being jealous of Reena’s perfect one), and while the hero did not come from a traditional nuclear family (I think he was raised by his grandparents or something, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten) he pretty much unreservedly accepts that Reena’s family is the ideal of which his fell short.
I think the reason I was okay with the book’s portrayal of family was that it seemed to be taking a close look at something specific, rather than a broad look at something general. I find these sorts of story problematic when they start promoting the traditional nuclear family at the expense of other, less common family structures (I was really annoyed when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince seemed to suggest that Voldemort grew up evil because his mother had the temerity to die in childbirth). Although Blue Smoke seems to take “husband, wife, and two or more kids” as its ideal family structure, it spends a lot of time exploring ways in which that structure can fall short of the ideal, and ways in which it can encompass a plurality of lifestyles and choices without necessarily sacrificing the basic idea of the traditional family unit.
So for example Reena puts her time and energy into her career but, once she meets Bo, it is pretty clear that she intends to settle down with him and have kids, and this isn’t shown as being incompatible or a compromise, just as being a different way in which she can have the same things that her brother and sisters have had. Conversely while the villain comes from a broken home, it isn’t a non-traditional broken home, he’s still got a mother and a father who are married – it’s just that his father is an abusive dickhead.
Perhaps most interestingly, Reena’s older sister Bella marries young (and to a much richer man) in a specific attempt to get the ideal fairytale wedding and (presumably) perfect family life. It all goes wrong and she winds up stuck in a loveless marriage with a guy who cheats on her. What I found interesting about this was that she resolves to stay with the guy, and that this is seen as a valid decision if not a hundred percent happy one. At the same time it didn’t seem like she was staying with him because divorce was unconscionable, just that she’d made a decision that – for her – a stable home with children she loved and a husband she didn’t was an acceptable situation, even if it wasn’t what she’d hoped for.
I’ve not said much so far about Bo (although I should probably mention that it took me a reasonable amount of time to get over the name). I feel a bit bad about this because he’s a lot better than many of the heroes I’ve read. Thirteen-year-crush aside, he’s basically a very ordinary person who has a nice straightforward healthy relationship with the heroine and doesn’t try to blackmail her or threaten her or rape her or any of the other dickish, controlling or outright criminal bullshit I’ve seen from the leading men in other books. Given the amount of facepalming I’ve done at alphole shitbuckets over the last few months, I was quite pleased to have a hero who just seemed to be a straight up decent guy – it’s just that because he was basically quite a nice person he didn’t really do much to drive the narrative.
Bo’s relationship with Reena is perfectly grown-up and sensible. They have a small fight because he gets worried about her doing dangerous things, but he never actually tries to stop her doing them. There’s even a scene where Reena sees him hugging a female friend, and then afterwards he’s like “oh my god it wasn’t what it looked like!” and she’s like “it’s okay, she was clearly your friend and she was clearly upset and I’m glad you looked out for her.” I wonder, incidentally, if this is something to do with the book being Romantic Suspense. Since there is a large external threat providing the main conflict in the narrative, there’s less need for the central romance to be an additional source of tension. As obstacles on the road to true love go “a pyromaniac from my childhood has literally murdered anybody I have ever been romantically involved with” is kind of hard to top anyway.
Everything I learned about life, love and arson from reading Blue Smoke: Waxed paper can be used to make effective trailers promoting the spread of fire throughout the target area. Just because you’ve seen a girl twice in thirteen years, doesn’t mean you won’t be able to work it out eventually. Air circulation is important for fires, so be certain to crack a window particularly if you’re torching a vehicle. Pizza joints are a great place to meet your future wife. Breaking a wall open will allow the fire to spread into the wall cavity, increasing structural damage to the building, the risk of collapse and the hazards faced by rescue personnel. Date a carpenter, they’re good with their hands.
Blue Smoke was my first foray into the world of Romantic Suspense, and it threw me a bit of a curve ball. I’ve said before that reading genre fiction is, in part, a process of habituation. You gradually get used to certain signs, signifiers and conventions which allow you to get – for want of a better term – on the same page as the author. And until you do get used to the conventions of a genre, you tend to spend a lot of time saying things like “why are there twenty made up words in the first paragraph of this book about spaceships?” or “why has nothing been resolved three pages from the end of this book about wizards?”.
I’ve been doing the Romance Thing for a good few months now and I’m slowly getting used to some of the major conventions of the genre – I’m a lot less thrown now when random dudes start fixating on women they’ve hardly met, or when a completely ordinary guy with a white collar job takes his shirt off to reveal perfectly sculpted abs and biceps thicker than my waist (I mean, I’m not confused when it happens in a book I’m reading – I’d be pretty confused if it happened, like, at work or something). And I’ve always been familiar with the conventions of secondary-world fiction, so paranormals and the like have always been fairly easy for me to get my head around.
But I don’t read thrillers. Okay, I tell a lie, I think I’ve read two in my life, and one of those was a Dan Brown. This meant that Blue Smoke was, for me, a mashup of tropes from two different genres neither of which I’m really familiar with.
As always, this is a discussion as much as a review, so we’re about to set sail on the good ship spoiler. And again I should probably say that since this is, y’know, suspense that spoilers might make quite a big difference to your reading.
One of the things I’d got used to in my romance reading thus far was the central relationship being set up early – in most of the books I’ve read the hero and heroine have met by chapter three at the latest. I was a bit disconcerted, therefore, when I found myself 10% of the way into Blue Smoke and the heroine had not only failed to meet the hero, but had also failed to get past the age of eleven. Nearly the whole first half of the book was set five years or more before the “present day” of the story, setting up the heroine’s background, her circumstances, and her relationships with her family, with men, and with fire. I should stress that this isn’t a criticism – I understand why this stuff needed to be established – it’s just very much not the kind of structure I was used to seeing from the genre.
Anyway, our heroine is Reena Hale – an Irish-Italian-American arson investigator, who chose her career at the age of eleven when her parents’ pizza restaurant was burned down by an irate neighbour. A tiny, pedantic part of me is a little tired of trauma-induced-career-choice as a trope, on grounds of plausibility if nothing else. I might be completely misinformed here, but I understand that most degree programs really don’t want to be told that you’re only studying the subject because you were in some way personally affected by it. When Reena is eighteen a mysterious pyromaniacal psychopath burns her boyfriend to death, making it look like an accident, and when she’s twenty-something the same psychopath murders her next boyfriend and lights up the body. In her late twenties, the psycho visits her again just as she’s breaking up with an abusive, controlling asshole – this time torching said asshole’s car and trying to pin it on Reena.
This picaresque tour of Reena’s fire-damaged love-life is interspersed with scenes from the viewpoint of our hero Bo who, having seen Reena for literally seconds across a crowded party in 1992 has been fantasising about her ever since. It is, I think, testimony to the quality of the book and the handling of Bo’s character that this does not make him come across as an irredeemable nutcase. The action finally catches up with the present day (2005) when Reena buys a house that just happens to be next door to Bo, and at exactly the same time the mysterious psychopath comes back to burn everything the hell to the ground.
As I have already intimated, I made some basic genre errors reading Blue Smoke. My first mistake was assuming that it would start with an adult heroine and make her relationship with the hero the primary focus, rather than starting with the heroine at the age of eleven and making – in a way – her unwitting relationship with the villain (and with fire itself) the primary pillar of the narrative. My second mistake was reading the book as a mystery when it’s actually a thriller.
I should probably stress that I’m even more out of my depth talking about subgenres in Crime than I am talking about subgenres in Romance, so this may be complete nonsense. The distinction I’m trying to draw is between a story in which the primary narrative tension comes from uncertainty about what is happening and who is causing it (a mystery) and one in which the primary narrative tension comes from what is going to happen next (a thriller). Obviously subgenre conventions are a lot more complicated than that in real life (Hammett, for example, wrote stories in which it wasn’t clear what was happening, or what would happen next), but a defining feature of what I’m calling a “mystery” is the invitation to the reader to play along at home, to try to work out what the “answer” is before the protagonists do.
Because I read most of Blue Smoke as a mystery, I spent at least half of the book assuming that the misogynistic, Reena-obsessed serial killer was going to turn out not to be the transparently sociopathic kid from the first chapter who killed his own dog and left its burning corpse on Reena’s doorstep, because that would surely have been too obvious. Instead I managed to convince myself that he would turn out to be the kindly fire investigator who takes Reena under his wing at the start of the book. This meant that I spent about a quarter of the book fighting a kind of weird cognitive dissonance, as my thought process went something like this:
Hey, she’s mentioned that the kid over the road is staring at their burning restaurant with a crazy look in his eyes. That’s clearly a red herring. Hey, now the kid has left a burning dog corpse on her doorstep. Clearly another red herring. Hey, now somebody’s murdered her boyfriend but I am so clever that I have spotted the subtle clues – the killer was clearly somebody who looked respectable enough to get this guy to let his guard down, and he clearly knew about the way fires spread and the way they were investigated, so clearly it’s the fire-investigator guy. Okay, now she’s realised that somebody’s after her, okay, now she’s going over the possible suspects – and now she’s decided it’s probably psycho-dog-burning-kid which means we’re just about ready to set up for the big revelation that it isn’t. Which should be coming about now. Right about now. Hey, I’m kind of at the 90% mark here and she still thinks it’s the dog-burning-kid, it’s getting kind of late in the day for a major plot twist. Oh, she’s finally confronted the guy. Oh…
It probably says something about my tendency to overthink things that the most surprising plot twist I’ve encountered in a book this year was when the killer turned out to be the guy it was clearly set up to be from the start.
Despite my confusion, the suspense plot in Blue Smoke worked pretty well for me. The resident psychopath was sufficiently psychopathic that I kept reading to find out what he’d burn down next, and sufficiently horrible that I wanted to see him get his at the end. The romance plot felt a little secondary to me, but I’m not sure that was a problem in and of itself and I suspect that part of the reason it felt so secondary was that it was well enough integrated into the suspense plot that it didn’t intrude. Besides, when an evil madman is trying to burn everybody you care about to death your love life naturally takes a bit of a back seat.
The other thing I found a little surprising about Blue Smoke was how well I responded to its core ideas about family, despite their being rather more conservative than I’d usually find comfortable. A massive central theme of the book is the overwhelming importance of a very traditional marriage-and-kids based family life. The heroine’s family is basically the most important thing in her world, the villain’s raging psychosis is frequently shown to stem from his growing up in an unstable family (and being jealous of Reena’s perfect one), and while the hero did not come from a traditional nuclear family (I think he was raised by his grandparents or something, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten) he pretty much unreservedly accepts that Reena’s family is the ideal of which his fell short.
I think the reason I was okay with the book’s portrayal of family was that it seemed to be taking a close look at something specific, rather than a broad look at something general. I find these sorts of story problematic when they start promoting the traditional nuclear family at the expense of other, less common family structures (I was really annoyed when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince seemed to suggest that Voldemort grew up evil because his mother had the temerity to die in childbirth). Although Blue Smoke seems to take “husband, wife, and two or more kids” as its ideal family structure, it spends a lot of time exploring ways in which that structure can fall short of the ideal, and ways in which it can encompass a plurality of lifestyles and choices without necessarily sacrificing the basic idea of the traditional family unit.
So for example Reena puts her time and energy into her career but, once she meets Bo, it is pretty clear that she intends to settle down with him and have kids, and this isn’t shown as being incompatible or a compromise, just as being a different way in which she can have the same things that her brother and sisters have had. Conversely while the villain comes from a broken home, it isn’t a non-traditional broken home, he’s still got a mother and a father who are married – it’s just that his father is an abusive dickhead.
Perhaps most interestingly, Reena’s older sister Bella marries young (and to a much richer man) in a specific attempt to get the ideal fairytale wedding and (presumably) perfect family life. It all goes wrong and she winds up stuck in a loveless marriage with a guy who cheats on her. What I found interesting about this was that she resolves to stay with the guy, and that this is seen as a valid decision if not a hundred percent happy one. At the same time it didn’t seem like she was staying with him because divorce was unconscionable, just that she’d made a decision that – for her – a stable home with children she loved and a husband she didn’t was an acceptable situation, even if it wasn’t what she’d hoped for.
I’ve not said much so far about Bo (although I should probably mention that it took me a reasonable amount of time to get over the name). I feel a bit bad about this because he’s a lot better than many of the heroes I’ve read. Thirteen-year-crush aside, he’s basically a very ordinary person who has a nice straightforward healthy relationship with the heroine and doesn’t try to blackmail her or threaten her or rape her or any of the other dickish, controlling or outright criminal bullshit I’ve seen from the leading men in other books. Given the amount of facepalming I’ve done at alphole shitbuckets over the last few months, I was quite pleased to have a hero who just seemed to be a straight up decent guy – it’s just that because he was basically quite a nice person he didn’t really do much to drive the narrative.
Bo’s relationship with Reena is perfectly grown-up and sensible. They have a small fight because he gets worried about her doing dangerous things, but he never actually tries to stop her doing them. There’s even a scene where Reena sees him hugging a female friend, and then afterwards he’s like “oh my god it wasn’t what it looked like!” and she’s like “it’s okay, she was clearly your friend and she was clearly upset and I’m glad you looked out for her.” I wonder, incidentally, if this is something to do with the book being Romantic Suspense. Since there is a large external threat providing the main conflict in the narrative, there’s less need for the central romance to be an additional source of tension. As obstacles on the road to true love go “a pyromaniac from my childhood has literally murdered anybody I have ever been romantically involved with” is kind of hard to top anyway.
Everything I learned about life, love and arson from reading Blue Smoke: Waxed paper can be used to make effective trailers promoting the spread of fire throughout the target area. Just because you’ve seen a girl twice in thirteen years, doesn’t mean you won’t be able to work it out eventually. Air circulation is important for fires, so be certain to crack a window particularly if you’re torching a vehicle. Pizza joints are a great place to meet your future wife. Breaking a wall open will allow the fire to spread into the wall cavity, increasing structural damage to the building, the risk of collapse and the hazards faced by rescue personnel. Date a carpenter, they’re good with their hands.
June 14, 2025
Dnf
0 Stars
No stars for you. Wtf was that?????? I couldn't do it. I literally couldn't read more than 5 chapters. It was so boring 🥺 The plot was a total snooze fest, and the characters didn't grab me at all.
Bo Goodnight is the name of MMC. Yes, everyone you heard right. I'm calling it the worst name in literary history – no debate! 🙃🙃
Not the FMC saying becoming a teenager had been her life's ambition. Girl stopppp 😭😭
The FMC said "losing her virginity is like shedding the last vestige of childhood" lmao 🙄🙄
I'm pretty sure this author hates her MCs🙂🙂
I wanted to read about that psychopath villian but I can't torture myself for it 😫
0 Stars
No stars for you. Wtf was that?????? I couldn't do it. I literally couldn't read more than 5 chapters. It was so boring 🥺 The plot was a total snooze fest, and the characters didn't grab me at all.
Bo Goodnight is the name of MMC. Yes, everyone you heard right. I'm calling it the worst name in literary history – no debate! 🙃🙃
Not the FMC saying becoming a teenager had been her life's ambition. Girl stopppp 😭😭
The FMC said "losing her virginity is like shedding the last vestige of childhood" lmao 🙄🙄
I'm pretty sure this author hates her MCs🙂🙂
I wanted to read about that psychopath villian but I can't torture myself for it 😫
June 18, 2016
Nora’s books are one of my most reliable cures at times when my brain begs for a much needed rest. All of us readers have this amazing capacity to shut down and unplug, and for me, the best way to achieve this state of complete detachment from my everyday troubles is through one of Nora’s books. While I don’t much care for her paranormal work (PNR is just not my genre), no one writes romantic suspense better than she.
Blue Smoke is an old one, released more than ten years ago, but aside from the years on each chapter, nothing about it seems outdated. It begins as Nora’s story so often do, with our heroine’s childhood and the traumatic event that will determine the course of her life. From the very beginning, Catarina Hale stands out among her brothers and sisters. She is intelligent, inquisitive and systematic, a child that is never really a child. When a fire takes away her family’s livelihood, Reena knows exactly what she wants to be when she grows up. Everything from that point on is just another step toward her desired career as a fire investigator.
We follow Reena through various stages of her life, from one traumatic event to the next. While her career is on an accelerated path, her love life is miserable from the start. Somehow Reena’s love interests, no matter how superficial, always end up dead, and their death always involves fire. It takes a while for Reena to connect the dots, but not so long to make us doubt her intelligence.
As usual, Nora gives us a strong, independent heroine. She doesn’t need a man to save her, and even when the right one comes along, she doesn’t just hand over the reins. If anything, Reena is reluctant to share her life, but Bo Goodnight is just a bit too hard to resist. As we follow Reena through her education and the beginnings of her career, Bo is always in the background, dreaming about the mysterious girl he’s never had a chance to meet. Even though he’s just a touch too perfect, as Nora’s heroes tend to be, he is precisely what our Reena needs. I adored these two together and I appreciated how much time Nora took to develop a true relationship between them.
Even when her books are not perfect, I never hesitate to recommend Nora – not that she needs my recommendation. The woman is simply magical. Sinking into her story is one of my favorite feelings in the world.
Blue Smoke is an old one, released more than ten years ago, but aside from the years on each chapter, nothing about it seems outdated. It begins as Nora’s story so often do, with our heroine’s childhood and the traumatic event that will determine the course of her life. From the very beginning, Catarina Hale stands out among her brothers and sisters. She is intelligent, inquisitive and systematic, a child that is never really a child. When a fire takes away her family’s livelihood, Reena knows exactly what she wants to be when she grows up. Everything from that point on is just another step toward her desired career as a fire investigator.
We follow Reena through various stages of her life, from one traumatic event to the next. While her career is on an accelerated path, her love life is miserable from the start. Somehow Reena’s love interests, no matter how superficial, always end up dead, and their death always involves fire. It takes a while for Reena to connect the dots, but not so long to make us doubt her intelligence.
As usual, Nora gives us a strong, independent heroine. She doesn’t need a man to save her, and even when the right one comes along, she doesn’t just hand over the reins. If anything, Reena is reluctant to share her life, but Bo Goodnight is just a bit too hard to resist. As we follow Reena through her education and the beginnings of her career, Bo is always in the background, dreaming about the mysterious girl he’s never had a chance to meet. Even though he’s just a touch too perfect, as Nora’s heroes tend to be, he is precisely what our Reena needs. I adored these two together and I appreciated how much time Nora took to develop a true relationship between them.
Even when her books are not perfect, I never hesitate to recommend Nora – not that she needs my recommendation. The woman is simply magical. Sinking into her story is one of my favorite feelings in the world.
September 15, 2021
Sadly have had the impression for years that Nora Roberts books isn't forme for years. But I was gifted this book and I've been meaning to read more by her as I was proven wrong a few months ago. 3.5 stars. The story and plot was an entertaining read and I enjoyed my reading experience with it. But wasn't a new favorite but it did made me want to read more by her. I don't think I ever seen an author with such big back catalog before so I'm sure I'll find a few gems
November 10, 2025
Another solid romantic suspense! I love how we get so attached to the main character through a traumatic prologue, and then follow them as they find a passion to cope with what they went through and also fall in love. The suspense in here was SO CREEPY but in a really good way. You pretty much knew the villain from the beginning, but it was so disturbing watching that person mess with the heroine and she didn't even know it was happening. I loved the deep dive into her profession as a firefighter/fire investigator and the romance!? Loved. It was so cute how the hero was obsessed with her from the moment he saw her, but life took its' time before actually letting them be together. The middle was a bit slow, which is why this isn't a full five stars, but I definitely enjoyed this one!!
August 26, 2021
It's a good story, but it certainly won't be my favorite.
Mostly because there are a few things here that I don't like about my books, but these are of course my personal preference. I just don't like books in which we follow the main character's life from her childhood to the present day. All this time to the current plot seems to me then only a very long and a bit tedious introduction; I am eagerly awaiting the beginning of the true story. This was also the case here. And since this is a fairly long book, I had to wait a long time for this story to unfold. Unfortunately, it made me lose interest and I stopped reading this book for about a year.
Somewhere in half of the book, the story finally got really interesting for me. It was a pretty good story after all. Its strength is, as always with Nora Roberts, well-drawn interesting characters. It is very easy to like all of them - the main characters and their family and friends.
Romance in many ways was all about love at first sight and wasn't really very developed. Usually it bothers me a lot, but Roberts can keep even something like that from annoying me. Though I'd still rather see a little more of Reena and Bo's relationship building.
In addition to the events in Reena's life, the book devoted a lot of space to the suspense. We know from the beginning that someone is taking revenge on Reena and we also know who this person is. It was okay. Although the story turned out to be much more violent and darker than I expected. Especially towards the end. I'm not used to Nora Roberts like that. I didn't have a big problem with that, but it definitely surprised me.
Roberts has written several books in this style, and she seems to particularly like this pattern in recent years. I'm not a huge fan of it, but I still find enjoyment in her books.
Mostly because there are a few things here that I don't like about my books, but these are of course my personal preference. I just don't like books in which we follow the main character's life from her childhood to the present day. All this time to the current plot seems to me then only a very long and a bit tedious introduction; I am eagerly awaiting the beginning of the true story. This was also the case here. And since this is a fairly long book, I had to wait a long time for this story to unfold. Unfortunately, it made me lose interest and I stopped reading this book for about a year.
Somewhere in half of the book, the story finally got really interesting for me. It was a pretty good story after all. Its strength is, as always with Nora Roberts, well-drawn interesting characters. It is very easy to like all of them - the main characters and their family and friends.
Romance in many ways was all about love at first sight and wasn't really very developed. Usually it bothers me a lot, but Roberts can keep even something like that from annoying me. Though I'd still rather see a little more of Reena and Bo's relationship building.
In addition to the events in Reena's life, the book devoted a lot of space to the suspense. We know from the beginning that someone is taking revenge on Reena and we also know who this person is. It was okay. Although the story turned out to be much more violent and darker than I expected. Especially towards the end. I'm not used to Nora Roberts like that. I didn't have a big problem with that, but it definitely surprised me.
Roberts has written several books in this style, and she seems to particularly like this pattern in recent years. I'm not a huge fan of it, but I still find enjoyment in her books.
December 9, 2008
Prior to reading a book, especially when I have several other books to read on my "to-read" shelf, I check out Amazon.com's reviews. There were quite a few positive reviews for this book but more than a fair share of people slamming the book for one reason or another. Not certain what I was getting into, I read the book with lowered expectations and was pleasantly surprised.
When she was eleven, Reena watched her parents' Italian restaurant burn. It was arson, the culprit went to jail, and Reena found her life's work - investigating arson fires. The novel starts when Reena was eleven and in the first couple of hundred pages follows her at various points in her life as tragedy takes the life of her boyfriend, an almost boyfriend, and another fire is set to frame her. The isolated incidents take place over the course of 10 years, so while it is obvious to the reader that Reena is being singled out, it is not obvious to her.
At thirty-one, Reena buys a house next door to Bo Goodnight (great hero, but seriously horrible name, how high of a cheese factor can you get?). Bo has glimpsed Reena through the years at various points, once at a party, another time at the mall, once in traffic, but he has always been thwarted from actually being able to meet no matter how hard he tried to reach her. One of the highlights of the book is Reena stepping out into her back yard and meeting Bo for the first time. This is a funny, endearing scene that really had me liking Bo.
For those who are fans of J.D. Robb, this book will be a fun and great read for you. I'm a Nora Roberts fan, and I am also the first to admit that not all of her books are winners (the Key trilogy was unreadable). "Blue Smoke" is a fun book and an entertaining read. Reena has a large family that she is close to and spends a lot of time with, people in the neighborhood know her, and reading about her life and her neighborhood was enjoyable.
The romance is enjoyable, too, with two characters who do not treat each other horribly or get into stupid misunderstandings or fight for no reason. I particularly like to read romances where the main characters are not stupid or mean with each other, and this is a great example of that. The most believable romance stories to me are the ones where the characters like each other, respect each other, and have a fairly easy going relationship with each other. This novel illustrates the joy of that type of relationship.
In reading the unfavorable reviews, I think that Nora Roberts is in a very difficult position. There are many people who love the familiarity in a Roberts novel, the known happily ever after, the type of hero and heroines she writes, the kind of families she showcases. I think that when she writes books with these signature elements some people really enjoy them and some people wail "She's in a rut!"
However, when she branches out and does something different with her novels, as she does here, the reverse happens, people are upset that they had to read almost 200 pages before the main romance kicks in, while much of the book is relegated to solving a mystery that the readers have solved from page one.
None of these factors really dulled my enjoyment of the book. I tend to like Roberts' work, especially when she does something out of the ordinary. She writes well and even the beginning parts that I knew ahead of time would contain tragedy were extremely entertaining to read because Roberts is simply an excellent writer. I enjoyed the book immensely, in part due to the big family, the friendships, and sense of community she imbues this novel with.
I'm pleased that Nora Roberts continues to write different types of novels without paying too much attention to the criticism she receives. She can't please everyone, but her popularity shows that she does please the majority of people the majority of the time.
If you do not like her J.D. Robb books, give this one a pass, but for those who enjoy reading Roberts for her excellent writing, you will enjoy "Blue Smoke".
When she was eleven, Reena watched her parents' Italian restaurant burn. It was arson, the culprit went to jail, and Reena found her life's work - investigating arson fires. The novel starts when Reena was eleven and in the first couple of hundred pages follows her at various points in her life as tragedy takes the life of her boyfriend, an almost boyfriend, and another fire is set to frame her. The isolated incidents take place over the course of 10 years, so while it is obvious to the reader that Reena is being singled out, it is not obvious to her.
At thirty-one, Reena buys a house next door to Bo Goodnight (great hero, but seriously horrible name, how high of a cheese factor can you get?). Bo has glimpsed Reena through the years at various points, once at a party, another time at the mall, once in traffic, but he has always been thwarted from actually being able to meet no matter how hard he tried to reach her. One of the highlights of the book is Reena stepping out into her back yard and meeting Bo for the first time. This is a funny, endearing scene that really had me liking Bo.
For those who are fans of J.D. Robb, this book will be a fun and great read for you. I'm a Nora Roberts fan, and I am also the first to admit that not all of her books are winners (the Key trilogy was unreadable). "Blue Smoke" is a fun book and an entertaining read. Reena has a large family that she is close to and spends a lot of time with, people in the neighborhood know her, and reading about her life and her neighborhood was enjoyable.
The romance is enjoyable, too, with two characters who do not treat each other horribly or get into stupid misunderstandings or fight for no reason. I particularly like to read romances where the main characters are not stupid or mean with each other, and this is a great example of that. The most believable romance stories to me are the ones where the characters like each other, respect each other, and have a fairly easy going relationship with each other. This novel illustrates the joy of that type of relationship.
In reading the unfavorable reviews, I think that Nora Roberts is in a very difficult position. There are many people who love the familiarity in a Roberts novel, the known happily ever after, the type of hero and heroines she writes, the kind of families she showcases. I think that when she writes books with these signature elements some people really enjoy them and some people wail "She's in a rut!"
However, when she branches out and does something different with her novels, as she does here, the reverse happens, people are upset that they had to read almost 200 pages before the main romance kicks in, while much of the book is relegated to solving a mystery that the readers have solved from page one.
None of these factors really dulled my enjoyment of the book. I tend to like Roberts' work, especially when she does something out of the ordinary. She writes well and even the beginning parts that I knew ahead of time would contain tragedy were extremely entertaining to read because Roberts is simply an excellent writer. I enjoyed the book immensely, in part due to the big family, the friendships, and sense of community she imbues this novel with.
I'm pleased that Nora Roberts continues to write different types of novels without paying too much attention to the criticism she receives. She can't please everyone, but her popularity shows that she does please the majority of people the majority of the time.
If you do not like her J.D. Robb books, give this one a pass, but for those who enjoy reading Roberts for her excellent writing, you will enjoy "Blue Smoke".
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Read
November 24, 2024Part romance and part thriller; it will keep you on the edge of your seat! -Beth M.
dnf
August 12, 2016DNF at page 282
It was: "Started off well went meh in the middle the briefly picked up again" By that time though, I didn't care anymore.
At first I liked Reena, even if she seemed a little unrealistic at times. I would love to have that good of a memory sometimes. Loved her family and the pizza place, the pride everyone took in it.
Reena started to lose her appeal... not that she got on my nerves exactly, I just stopped caring. While I loved Bowen Goodnight, I never felt the chemistry between them, even during the two love scenes I read (my eyes glazed over a couple times actually). The baseball game date was cute but *shrugs*
We go through different periods of Reena's life, and while it was probably necessary to build her history and character up it just felt overlong. It was around page 170 I did the mental equivalent of checking my watch.
I guessed who the 'firebug' was pretty early but it didn't sour me any against the story, but I never felt the danger from him really. He was disturbed sure but I just couldn't muster any strong feelings toward him.
I stuck it out till the above mentioned page count but I just couldn't anymore.
A miss this time unfortunately but oh well, on to the next read.
It was: "Started off well went meh in the middle the briefly picked up again" By that time though, I didn't care anymore.
At first I liked Reena, even if she seemed a little unrealistic at times. I would love to have that good of a memory sometimes. Loved her family and the pizza place, the pride everyone took in it.
Reena started to lose her appeal... not that she got on my nerves exactly, I just stopped caring. While I loved Bowen Goodnight, I never felt the chemistry between them, even during the two love scenes I read (my eyes glazed over a couple times actually). The baseball game date was cute but *shrugs*
We go through different periods of Reena's life, and while it was probably necessary to build her history and character up it just felt overlong. It was around page 170 I did the mental equivalent of checking my watch.
I guessed who the 'firebug' was pretty early but it didn't sour me any against the story, but I never felt the danger from him really. He was disturbed sure but I just couldn't muster any strong feelings toward him.
I stuck it out till the above mentioned page count but I just couldn't anymore.
A miss this time unfortunately but oh well, on to the next read.
May 21, 2018
I’m in the middle of moving, ton things to do made me unable to finished a book without stopping a lot. If after I stopped I don’t interested to continue it later, I pick other books! That’s why I have so many currently reading. But this one is so good and I read till very late last night!😴😂
An arson investigator heroine, very interesting and dangerous job.
I don’t know why, but she reminds me to a softer version of Mrs. Roarke! Lol. Oh maybe I do, she saw too many victims in her line of work, and have a cool head just like Eve.
And a hero who fell in love and have a crush to our heroine and never actual met her for 13 years! 😂.
He saw her three times in 13 years but never able to approach her, she was his ‘dream girl’ since forever ❤️😘
I like this one very much! ❤️❤️❤️
An arson investigator heroine, very interesting and dangerous job.
I don’t know why, but she reminds me to a softer version of Mrs. Roarke! Lol. Oh maybe I do, she saw too many victims in her line of work, and have a cool head just like Eve.
And a hero who fell in love and have a crush to our heroine and never actual met her for 13 years! 😂.
He saw her three times in 13 years but never able to approach her, she was his ‘dream girl’ since forever ❤️😘
I like this one very much! ❤️❤️❤️
January 15, 2021
5 stars.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I couldn't find the time to review this during the holidays...just too much else going on...but I would be remiss if I didn't put anything out there because this was such a riveting story and I totally loved the heroine Reena (an arson investigator)...so mentally tough and fearless.
This story spans more than a decade and is quite a dark romantic suspense that also includes a relentless and evil stalker .
It also has a kind of slow burn romance going on between the heroine and the hero...she is his "Dream girl" that he spied once at a party from a distance but wasn't able to catch up with and connect.... he does manage to spot her twice more over the years with a somewhat similar outcome....so it is well into the book before they actually meet in person
This has to be my favorite Nora Roberts book that I have read so far ...and that is probably because the heroine reminds me so much of the "fabulous" Eve from her wonderful "In Death" series....sassy and so cool under pressure.
I couldn't find the time to review this during the holidays...just too much else going on...but I would be remiss if I didn't put anything out there because this was such a riveting story and I totally loved the heroine Reena (an arson investigator)...so mentally tough and fearless.
This story spans more than a decade and is quite a dark romantic suspense that also includes a relentless and evil stalker .
It also has a kind of slow burn romance going on between the heroine and the hero...she is his "Dream girl" that he spied once at a party from a distance but wasn't able to catch up with and connect.... he does manage to spot her twice more over the years with a somewhat similar outcome....so it is well into the book before they actually meet in person
This has to be my favorite Nora Roberts book that I have read so far ...and that is probably because the heroine reminds me so much of the "fabulous" Eve from her wonderful "In Death" series....sassy and so cool under pressure.
July 15, 2019
Reconozco que hasta la página 150, más o menos, alucinaba con que una novela de Roberts no me atrapara. Ay, amigo, pero qué equivocada estaba.
Es cierto que los primeros capítulos son saltos en el tiempo pasado de Reena, la protagonista, necesarios para la trama. Por supuesto, la autora ya te pone en tensión porque sabes que esos "accidentes" intermitentes marcarán la trama de la novela.
En cuanto a Reena, el personaje femenino principal, es fuerte, tenaz y le apasiona el fuego desde que las pizzería de sus padres arde cuando ella era solo una niña. De adulta, se hace investigadora de incendios. Por supuesto, no podía haber elegido una mejor profesión. Es encantadora, familiar y muy tozuda en su trabajo. Una mujer de armas tomas. Desde luego, alguien envidiable.
Bowen, Bo para los amigos, es el personaje masculino principal y, aunque al igual que los "accidentes" aparece de forma intermitente en los primeros capítulos, su presencia marcará un antes y un después en la vida de Reena. Encantador, dulce y fuerte al mismo tiempo, seguro de sí mismo, trabajador, romántico y un soñador empedernido. Vamos, de esos hombres que hoy en día no existen y por eso nos enamoramos de ellos entre páginas. Bo marcará la diferencia en la vida de Reena. Ganará su corazón con constancia y determinación, incluso aun que la deja claro que es la mujer de su vida desde el primer día que la vio, allá cuando Cristo perdió la chancla.
En fin, una historia entrañable, llena de desgracias enlazadas entre sí (he llorado como una niña sin caramelos) y con un final memorable.
¡Maravillosa!
Es cierto que los primeros capítulos son saltos en el tiempo pasado de Reena, la protagonista, necesarios para la trama. Por supuesto, la autora ya te pone en tensión porque sabes que esos "accidentes" intermitentes marcarán la trama de la novela.
En cuanto a Reena, el personaje femenino principal, es fuerte, tenaz y le apasiona el fuego desde que las pizzería de sus padres arde cuando ella era solo una niña. De adulta, se hace investigadora de incendios. Por supuesto, no podía haber elegido una mejor profesión. Es encantadora, familiar y muy tozuda en su trabajo. Una mujer de armas tomas. Desde luego, alguien envidiable.
Bowen, Bo para los amigos, es el personaje masculino principal y, aunque al igual que los "accidentes" aparece de forma intermitente en los primeros capítulos, su presencia marcará un antes y un después en la vida de Reena. Encantador, dulce y fuerte al mismo tiempo, seguro de sí mismo, trabajador, romántico y un soñador empedernido. Vamos, de esos hombres que hoy en día no existen y por eso nos enamoramos de ellos entre páginas. Bo marcará la diferencia en la vida de Reena. Ganará su corazón con constancia y determinación, incluso aun que la deja claro que es la mujer de su vida desde el primer día que la vio, allá cuando Cristo perdió la chancla.
En fin, una historia entrañable, llena de desgracias enlazadas entre sí (he llorado como una niña sin caramelos) y con un final memorable.
¡Maravillosa!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 14, 2022
Romantic Suspense / Mystery / Contemporary Romance
The Hale family lives in a Baltimore and is the second generation to run Sirico's, an Italian pizzeria. Gibson Hale married Bianca and was welcomed into the family business and the Italian family. Their children were loved, going to school, helping in the restaurant and learning the business. The attempted rape of 11-year-old Caterina "Reena" Hale sets into motion a series of events that will affect their lives in very different ways.
20 years later, the heroine, Reena Hale, is an arson investigator. It looks like someone is seeking revenge and setting fires. Someone is out there to make Reena's life miserable, but now things are starting to escalate and get out of hands.
The hero, Bo Goodnight, fell in love with Reena when he first saw her at a party during her college days. He can't believe his eyes when his "Dream Girl" moves in next door.
“I think there's a reason you moved in next door. I think there's a reason I saw you all those years ago, but didn't meet you until now. I don't think I was ready for you until now.”
This is one of my favorite stories by Nora Roberts. I like the flow of the story and the way author introduce young Reena first, then we get to see her development from teenager to a woman in her early 30s (no annoying Now/Then jumping). I enjoyed the strong sense of family this story had. Reena's relationship with her parents and siblings was emjoyable to follow. Loved the romance and chemistry between Reena and Bo. There were also many sad moments. What I didn't like were the bad guy's POVs, I didn't like reading the antagonist’s warped mind at all. The bad guy's thought spoiled some of the enjoyment and took away some of the mystery.
The Hale family lives in a Baltimore and is the second generation to run Sirico's, an Italian pizzeria. Gibson Hale married Bianca and was welcomed into the family business and the Italian family. Their children were loved, going to school, helping in the restaurant and learning the business. The attempted rape of 11-year-old Caterina "Reena" Hale sets into motion a series of events that will affect their lives in very different ways.
20 years later, the heroine, Reena Hale, is an arson investigator. It looks like someone is seeking revenge and setting fires. Someone is out there to make Reena's life miserable, but now things are starting to escalate and get out of hands.
The hero, Bo Goodnight, fell in love with Reena when he first saw her at a party during her college days. He can't believe his eyes when his "Dream Girl" moves in next door.
“I think there's a reason you moved in next door. I think there's a reason I saw you all those years ago, but didn't meet you until now. I don't think I was ready for you until now.”
This is one of my favorite stories by Nora Roberts. I like the flow of the story and the way author introduce young Reena first, then we get to see her development from teenager to a woman in her early 30s (no annoying Now/Then jumping). I enjoyed the strong sense of family this story had. Reena's relationship with her parents and siblings was emjoyable to follow. Loved the romance and chemistry between Reena and Bo. There were also many sad moments. What I didn't like were the bad guy's POVs, I didn't like reading the antagonist’s warped mind at all. The bad guy's thought spoiled some of the enjoyment and took away some of the mystery.
May 12, 2024
Re-read. Outstanding. The movie version didn't even come close. But, they never do.
June 30, 2014
So disappointing in so many ways. The story is spread out over twenty years and takes way, way too long getting to the "present" (2005). Roberts spends lots of time in key time periods that, sure, are integral to the story, but there is just so very much piled in. I feel like what should have been vignettes were artificially inflated to make them not just chapters, but entire sections of the book. Which mean that the book doesn't really start until it's practically over.
The two main characters were good enough, and the sole reason the book maintained its three stars. Bo is simply dreamy with his manly competence and even temper. Reena is less attractive with her hint of broken and career obsession. Her family helps make up for that, though, so it evens out on the plus column.
The central conflict, though, the main antagonist, just doesn't work. And that's far more serious. His identity isn't really a mystery (though Roberts avoids naming him for far too long) and his obsession is pretty clear as well. But he's way too competent for what he turns out to be and that makes him way, way too successful for the eventual plot. This affected the ending where I was left with a sense that the cost was too much and artificially inflated at that. This made the ending feel unearned in a way that makes you reevaluate the whole story. Which is where you find that it really doesn't work because not only was the bad guy too competent in the end, but he was more competent than he should have been all the way up front, too.
So yeah, I felt fundamentally cheated and manipulated with the main plot and ended up wishing that this had been a straight-forward romance rather than one of Roberts' thrillers.
A note about Steamy: Another area I felt robbed as the main characters get essentially one decent intimate scene with two half-hearted sketches later that feel peremptory, at best. This is made worse by dragging us through another scene with Reena and somebody else and I actually kind of hate that.
The two main characters were good enough, and the sole reason the book maintained its three stars. Bo is simply dreamy with his manly competence and even temper. Reena is less attractive with her hint of broken and career obsession. Her family helps make up for that, though, so it evens out on the plus column.
The central conflict, though, the main antagonist, just doesn't work. And that's far more serious. His identity isn't really a mystery (though Roberts avoids naming him for far too long) and his obsession is pretty clear as well. But he's way too competent for what he turns out to be and that makes him way, way too successful for the eventual plot. This affected the ending where I was left with a sense that the cost was too much and artificially inflated at that. This made the ending feel unearned in a way that makes you reevaluate the whole story. Which is where you find that it really doesn't work because not only was the bad guy too competent in the end, but he was more competent than he should have been all the way up front, too.
So yeah, I felt fundamentally cheated and manipulated with the main plot and ended up wishing that this had been a straight-forward romance rather than one of Roberts' thrillers.
A note about Steamy: Another area I felt robbed as the main characters get essentially one decent intimate scene with two half-hearted sketches later that feel peremptory, at best. This is made worse by dragging us through another scene with Reena and somebody else and I actually kind of hate that.
June 8, 2020
I am getting my NR fix these days. This one had my heart pumping with all that's going on. The killer is one sick f@ck. It's a good thing our heroine is the way she is. An arson investigator. Strong and smart. That's what she is.
September 10, 2016
Já foi lido em 2014, mas agora é k percebi k n tinha nos "lidos" no Goodreads
August 25, 2007
BLUE SMOKE (Romantic Thriller-Baltimore-Cont) – G+
Roberts, Nora – Standalone
Putnam, 2005- Hardcover
When Reena Hale was 12 years old, events lead to her family's restaurant being burnt by an arsonist. With that, Reena was determined to become an arson investigator with the Baltimore police. Other fires have touched those know to Reena, but now it has become very personal and very dangerous.
*** I am a huge fan of Ms. Roberts work and applaud her moving more into stories where the emphasis is more on the mystery than the romance. This was a well-crafted story, beginning when Reena is young and traveling through experiences in her life to present day. The excellent characters, relationships, dialogue and sense of place, along with the romance and intimate scenes that are the hallmark of Robert's writing are all here. The only problem I had was that you know the villain from the beginning, so it does diminish the element of suspense. Still, it is understandable that Reena doesn't put it together until the end and the final scenes bring the suspense into the story. There is graphic violence and profanity, but it's realistic and clear that Roberts did her research on fires. Roberts is an excellent writer who has a permanent place on my "must buy" list.
Roberts, Nora – Standalone
Putnam, 2005- Hardcover
When Reena Hale was 12 years old, events lead to her family's restaurant being burnt by an arsonist. With that, Reena was determined to become an arson investigator with the Baltimore police. Other fires have touched those know to Reena, but now it has become very personal and very dangerous.
*** I am a huge fan of Ms. Roberts work and applaud her moving more into stories where the emphasis is more on the mystery than the romance. This was a well-crafted story, beginning when Reena is young and traveling through experiences in her life to present day. The excellent characters, relationships, dialogue and sense of place, along with the romance and intimate scenes that are the hallmark of Robert's writing are all here. The only problem I had was that you know the villain from the beginning, so it does diminish the element of suspense. Still, it is understandable that Reena doesn't put it together until the end and the final scenes bring the suspense into the story. There is graphic violence and profanity, but it's realistic and clear that Roberts did her research on fires. Roberts is an excellent writer who has a permanent place on my "must buy" list.
March 23, 2010
This was a reread for me, and I think I liked it even more the second time. Obviously the suspense was muted, but I was surprised at how many details I had forgotten about the fires and deaths. This time I was able to concentrate more on the emotions and interactions of the characters, and this was simply wonderful! I know some readers were disappointed with the slow development - Reena and Bo didn't even meet until nearly 200 pages into the story! - but to me the strength of this story is in the gradual buildup of events through the years, which actually puts more tension into the current-day events. Above all, I loved the strength of family love and support that Ms. Roberts shows us throughout this story, and the way the Hale family extended that love so completely and naturally to Bo.
Here's a couple of my favorite 'mom-isms' from Mrs. Hale:
"We're still your parents, and we'll be your parents a hundred years after you're dead."
"Your father has realized what was obvious - that I was right."
I come from a large family, so this line just seemed so natural to me: "The floor was littered with kids of varying ages, with adults stepping over or around them." Yup, that's how it's done!
Here's a couple of my favorite 'mom-isms' from Mrs. Hale:
"We're still your parents, and we'll be your parents a hundred years after you're dead."
"Your father has realized what was obvious - that I was right."
I come from a large family, so this line just seemed so natural to me: "The floor was littered with kids of varying ages, with adults stepping over or around them." Yup, that's how it's done!
September 19, 2021
I can’t bring myself to give any Nora Roberts book which has the point of view of the murderer any more than three stars. I straight up skipped those pages and still found them nauseating. And there was something so disquietingly competent about the evil there - so much would have to go right to make the plan work, and in a world where so much was so chancy (Dream Girl! …not my taste, that), frankly it seemed implausible to the point where the world felt less believable.
The family and friends parts were great. Interestingly, everyone felt like a more rounded character when interacting with a group, less so as an individual.
The family and friends parts were great. Interestingly, everyone felt like a more rounded character when interacting with a group, less so as an individual.
August 18, 2024
DNF
-First this is so freaking boring gah I could push through if it wasn’t boring lol
-2nd I get why we are following the h for around 20 year of her life to show traumatic events and BF getting killed. But why oh why do we follow the H? I mean we only see him w OW I don’t want to see that! No. It’s enough to know he has a past once he meets the h but to be in his head while he is on dates and thinking about sex and OW no way. There is absolutely no pint to that. So BYE! Not for me
-First this is so freaking boring gah I could push through if it wasn’t boring lol
-2nd I get why we are following the h for around 20 year of her life to show traumatic events and BF getting killed. But why oh why do we follow the H? I mean we only see him w OW I don’t want to see that! No. It’s enough to know he has a past once he meets the h but to be in his head while he is on dates and thinking about sex and OW no way. There is absolutely no pint to that. So BYE! Not for me
May 4, 2008
When Catarina "Reena" Hale was eleven years old, she watched with her family--father Gib, mother Bianca, sister Francesca, sister Isabella, and brother Xander--as their family business, Sirico's, burned to the ground. The case came to a swift conclusion, when the father of a boy who had attempted to assault Reena is picked up for arson. The family rebuilds their business, their family ties stay strong, and their love and respect in the neighborhood grows.
We fast-forward to Reena in college, where she's finally decided to lose her virginity to Josh, a fellow student who yearns to be a writer. After her sister Bella's dream wedding, Reena has sex with her boyfriend, returns home, and later discovers that Josh has died during a horrific apartment fire--after supposedly falling asleep in bed with a lit cigarette.
Again, fast-forward. Reena is still in training to become an arson investigator, her life-long dream. She's a member of the police force, has worked actual fires with her fellow firefighters, and now needs to finish her training. A firefighter she was thinking of dating dies in an apparent robbery, shot and left in his burning truck.
Still farther into the future, Reena is a full-fledged arson investigator, and tragedy finds her once again. Only days after earning her gold shield, Luke, a boyfriend whose marriage proposal she turned down, has his Mercedes burned sky-high, and of course Reena is the main suspect. After she's cleared, she's only more determined than ever to make fire her job--to find out who sets it, and why, and to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Then she meets Bowen "Bo" Goodnight, her new next-door-neighbor, and feelings and emotions get jumbled up with the fires that seem to dog her every step. Because someone has made her their vendetta, and will stop at nothing to make sure that his own brand of justice is served.
I loved BLUE SMOKE! Although it took me four days to read, weighing in at 437 pages and spanning twenty years, the book is a wonderful mix of engaging family saga, taut police/arson procedural, and down and out thriller. I don't agree with the other reviewers who said this book was "horror" or that Ms. Roberts delved too deeply into the mind of the killer--most romantic suspense (and this is definitely one of those books) these days go more into the who, how, and why and less on the fluff. I commend Ms. Roberts for another winning story, one which I was sad to see end. I loved reading about the Hale family and their extended relations, and I'm sure you'll be as enthralled by them as I was.
**I have to also say that BLUE SMOKE reads a lot like Nora Robert's alter-ego, J.D. Robb, in a lot of instances. Some of the short sentences, rapid-pace dialogue, and out-loud ruminating are reminiscent of Eve Dallas, but that only adds to the allure of BLUE SMOKE, instead of taking away from it. Kudos on another winner!
We fast-forward to Reena in college, where she's finally decided to lose her virginity to Josh, a fellow student who yearns to be a writer. After her sister Bella's dream wedding, Reena has sex with her boyfriend, returns home, and later discovers that Josh has died during a horrific apartment fire--after supposedly falling asleep in bed with a lit cigarette.
Again, fast-forward. Reena is still in training to become an arson investigator, her life-long dream. She's a member of the police force, has worked actual fires with her fellow firefighters, and now needs to finish her training. A firefighter she was thinking of dating dies in an apparent robbery, shot and left in his burning truck.
Still farther into the future, Reena is a full-fledged arson investigator, and tragedy finds her once again. Only days after earning her gold shield, Luke, a boyfriend whose marriage proposal she turned down, has his Mercedes burned sky-high, and of course Reena is the main suspect. After she's cleared, she's only more determined than ever to make fire her job--to find out who sets it, and why, and to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Then she meets Bowen "Bo" Goodnight, her new next-door-neighbor, and feelings and emotions get jumbled up with the fires that seem to dog her every step. Because someone has made her their vendetta, and will stop at nothing to make sure that his own brand of justice is served.
I loved BLUE SMOKE! Although it took me four days to read, weighing in at 437 pages and spanning twenty years, the book is a wonderful mix of engaging family saga, taut police/arson procedural, and down and out thriller. I don't agree with the other reviewers who said this book was "horror" or that Ms. Roberts delved too deeply into the mind of the killer--most romantic suspense (and this is definitely one of those books) these days go more into the who, how, and why and less on the fluff. I commend Ms. Roberts for another winning story, one which I was sad to see end. I loved reading about the Hale family and their extended relations, and I'm sure you'll be as enthralled by them as I was.
**I have to also say that BLUE SMOKE reads a lot like Nora Robert's alter-ego, J.D. Robb, in a lot of instances. Some of the short sentences, rapid-pace dialogue, and out-loud ruminating are reminiscent of Eve Dallas, but that only adds to the allure of BLUE SMOKE, instead of taking away from it. Kudos on another winner!
April 29, 2022
Blue Smoke
4 Stars
Catarina Hale's childhood changed irrevocably in a fiery blaze that destroyed her family's restaurant. Now a detective with Baltimore's arson unit, Reena has dedicated her life to studying every facet of fire and to solving the crimes that wreak havoc on the victims. In sharp contrast, Reena's personal relationships have been unfulfilling until she meets Bo Goodnight, a man with an open mind and an open heart. But a threat from Reena's past - one that has been stalking her for years - has emerged from the shadows to endanger the life and love she has worked so hard for.
***Warning:*** This book contains harsher depictions of violence than is the norm for Nora Roberts. Moreover, there is one quite descriptive toward the end that some readers may find disturbing. As an avid reader of mysteries and thrillers that can get quite gruesome at times, this was not an issue for me and does not factor into my review.
This is another re-read for me, and although I remembered the general plot, the specific details were rather murky. As with some of Nora's other works, such as Public Secrets and Hideaway, the first few chapters, about 1/3, focuses on Reena's childhood, college years and early professional life. While this part is quite long, it provides the necessary background for the events that occur in the rest of the book. It also contributes to characterization, especially to Reena's relationship with her close-knit family. One of Nora's strengths as a writer is her ability to create these wonderful and lively families in her books, and the Sirico-Hale clan is no exception.
The romance is very engaging. Reena is a likable heroine despite some of her hang-ups (which are understandable given the circumstances) and I particularly enjoyed her backbone in dealing with some of the issues that arise both in her personal and professional life. Bo is definitely one of the best Nora heroes ever. He is the perfect combination of sexy, protective and hilarious.
With regard to the suspense plot, the identity of the villain is more or less revealed at the start, so most of the tension revolves around the horrific crimes and the excitement of the climax and resolution.
In sum, an immersive story overall once it gets going and it is certainly worth reading if only for Bo Goodnight.
4 Stars
Catarina Hale's childhood changed irrevocably in a fiery blaze that destroyed her family's restaurant. Now a detective with Baltimore's arson unit, Reena has dedicated her life to studying every facet of fire and to solving the crimes that wreak havoc on the victims. In sharp contrast, Reena's personal relationships have been unfulfilling until she meets Bo Goodnight, a man with an open mind and an open heart. But a threat from Reena's past - one that has been stalking her for years - has emerged from the shadows to endanger the life and love she has worked so hard for.
***Warning:*** This book contains harsher depictions of violence than is the norm for Nora Roberts. Moreover, there is one quite descriptive toward the end that some readers may find disturbing. As an avid reader of mysteries and thrillers that can get quite gruesome at times, this was not an issue for me and does not factor into my review.
This is another re-read for me, and although I remembered the general plot, the specific details were rather murky. As with some of Nora's other works, such as Public Secrets and Hideaway, the first few chapters, about 1/3, focuses on Reena's childhood, college years and early professional life. While this part is quite long, it provides the necessary background for the events that occur in the rest of the book. It also contributes to characterization, especially to Reena's relationship with her close-knit family. One of Nora's strengths as a writer is her ability to create these wonderful and lively families in her books, and the Sirico-Hale clan is no exception.
The romance is very engaging. Reena is a likable heroine despite some of her hang-ups (which are understandable given the circumstances) and I particularly enjoyed her backbone in dealing with some of the issues that arise both in her personal and professional life. Bo is definitely one of the best Nora heroes ever. He is the perfect combination of sexy, protective and hilarious.
With regard to the suspense plot, the identity of the villain is more or less revealed at the start, so most of the tension revolves around the horrific crimes and the excitement of the climax and resolution.
In sum, an immersive story overall once it gets going and it is certainly worth reading if only for Bo Goodnight.
May 3, 2022
Como dije en mi blog, esto es más suspense que romántica. El romance entre la protagonista, Reena, y el chico de la peli, Bo, es bastante secundario. Caterina es una italoamericana cuyos padres tienen, ¿cómo no?, una pizzería y todos los tópicos que se te ocurran de los italianos, están ahí: la mamma, la vida familiar, el buen comer, los aspavientos, etc. Lo sobrellevas, pero bueno, no hay que dejar de ver que son un estereotipo. Hay toda una primera parte dedicada a ella de niña, y luego su formación. Pero el meollo del asunto es cuando, de adulta, trabaja como policía investigadora de incendios, y un psicópata pirómano amenaza toda su vida y a aquellos a quienes ama. Habrá algún momento durillo, lo aviso. Es uno de esos libros en los que Nora Roberts demuestra que es la reina del competence porn. Reena es una profesional muy buena en lo suyo, que hace que te quedes colgada viendo lo que es el fuego, cómo se monta un incendio, cómo se combate, y luego de qué manera se puede investigar. Muy entretenida.
September 15, 2014
I enjoyed this to a certain point, especially young Reena but I found it much too long with lots of unnecessary filler before we get to the main story and I found the bad guy too clever (given he is setting fires and killing people for a 10 yr period and he eludes capture wreaking a ridiculous amount of havoc even after they know who he is but there is no mention of a particularly high IQ at any point) and the amount of damage he was able to inflict before they caught him ridiculously high. I think that at one point he murders 2 (or possibly 3) people, sets two fires and booby traps a fire extinguisher ON THE SAME NIGHT. For me that dropped it from a solid 3 down to a 2.
February 23, 2008
This book is the reason I wish I could stop reading once I realize I can't stand any of the characters. But I can't. Somewhere deep down, I don't want to give up. I just keep hoping that somehow, someway, the book I am reading will get better. In this case, it never does. It's just gross, and graphic, and violent.
I've decided I'm not a big Nora Roberts fan. I think she's a sell-out.
Don't read this. You've been warned.
I've decided I'm not a big Nora Roberts fan. I think she's a sell-out.
Don't read this. You've been warned.
October 14, 2024
From early childhood fire accompanies Reena's life and has very much impact on her life. Unfortunatelly most of the experiences are not as innocent as they first appear.
This was another great book by Nora Roberts.
Edit October 2024:
I changed the rating from 5* to 4* because of the graphic violence and some other (mostly personal) issues I’m no more willing to overlook/accept as given or part of our cultures.
This was another great book by Nora Roberts.
Edit October 2024:
I changed the rating from 5* to 4* because of the graphic violence and some other (mostly personal) issues I’m no more willing to overlook/accept as given or part of our cultures.
November 6, 2023
4,4/5 ⭐️
PL
Renna od dziecka przejawiała sie genialnym umysłem i miała predyspozycje do zostania detektywem, zapamiętywała każdy drobny szczegół.
Przez budowe i styl pisania autorki przyjemnie sie to czyta
- duzo dialogow
- Postacie nie sa płaskie, każda jest inna i nacechowana
Relacja Bo z Reeną uwielbiam, wątki Reeny w akcji też super opisane, opis morderstwa Pani Deborah bardzo szczegołowy. I to PIEKELNIE dobre zakończenie tej historii.
To moja pierwsza przeczytana książka Nory i sięgnę napewno po kolejne, spodobał mi się styl tej autorki 😁
ENG
Since childhood, Renna had a brilliant mind and had a predisposition to become a detective, she remembered every little detail.
Thanks to the author's style and style of writing, it is very enjoyable to read.
- a lot of dialogue.
- The characters are not flat, each is different and characterized
Bo's relationship with Reena I love, Reena's threads in action are also super described, the description of Deborah's murder is very detailed. And that's a hell of a good ending to the story.
This is my first book by Nora and I will definitely reach for another one, I liked the style of this author 😉
PL
Renna od dziecka przejawiała sie genialnym umysłem i miała predyspozycje do zostania detektywem, zapamiętywała każdy drobny szczegół.
Przez budowe i styl pisania autorki przyjemnie sie to czyta
- duzo dialogow
- Postacie nie sa płaskie, każda jest inna i nacechowana
Relacja Bo z Reeną uwielbiam, wątki Reeny w akcji też super opisane, opis morderstwa Pani Deborah bardzo szczegołowy. I to PIEKELNIE dobre zakończenie tej historii.
To moja pierwsza przeczytana książka Nory i sięgnę napewno po kolejne, spodobał mi się styl tej autorki 😁
ENG
Since childhood, Renna had a brilliant mind and had a predisposition to become a detective, she remembered every little detail.
Thanks to the author's style and style of writing, it is very enjoyable to read.
- a lot of dialogue.
- The characters are not flat, each is different and characterized
Bo's relationship with Reena I love, Reena's threads in action are also super described, the description of Deborah's murder is very detailed. And that's a hell of a good ending to the story.
This is my first book by Nora and I will definitely reach for another one, I liked the style of this author 😉
Want to read
May 24, 2017The movie BLUE SMOKE tells the story of a young girl who sees her family's pizzeria burn to the ground, and she knows she wants to be a firefighter when she grows older. Little did she know that a pyromaniac stalker threatens her life and the life of all she loves and holds dear since that night till this day.
Reena and Bo are also soulmates, and I love how he fell for her from day one, and how later on he becomes her neighbor.
Reena and Bo are also soulmates, and I love how he fell for her from day one, and how later on he becomes her neighbor.
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