Northern Lights
Nora Roberts, 2004
★ 4.06 from 51.5k ratings on Goodreads
Romance Mystery, thriller & crime
A burned-out Baltimore cop takes a job as police chief in a tiny Alaskan town and finds a place where everyone knows everyone—and something is badly wrong. Unease and curiosity run through a dramatic, passionate story, paced slowly against a vast Alaskan landscape.
Feels like curiosity, unease and passion. About love, adventure and society.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy romance mixed with small-town crime and a vivid, isolating Alaska setting. Be aware that some readers find the story slow and overlong, and reactions to the romance and heroine are mixed.
Why read it
It offers a burned-out cop's recovery, a town where everyone knows everyone, and a landscape that presses on every scene; read it for atmosphere and gradual tension.
A page from the book
What it feels like to see something too large to be real.
His only coherent thought as they shuddered along was that nothing real should be that massive. As the sun beamed God fingers through the heavy sky around it, the shadows began to drip and spread, blue over white, and its icy face glinted. What readers say
Readers often respond to the vivid Alaska setting and the hero’s recovery, while some find the story slow and overlong; opinions split on the romance and heroine, and the mystery draws both praise and frustration.
Nora Roberts.Nora Roberts writes the In Death police procedurals as J. D. Robb; Northern Lights is set in the fictional Alaskan town of Lunacy.
Books that feel like this
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A painter comes home to the Chesapeake, to four brothers, a porch rocker and a florist who has sworn off being charmed.
Tribute
Nora Roberts, 2008
A former child star trades Hollywood for a ruined Virginia farmhouse — her grandmother's — and the small town that remembers the screen legend better than she does.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Northern Lights for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy romance mixed with small-town crime and a vivid, isolating Alaska setting. Be aware that some readers find the story slow and overlong, and reactions to the romance and heroine are mixed.
- What is Northern Lights like?
- Unease and curiosity run through a dramatic, passionate story, paced slowly against a vast Alaskan landscape. Feels like curiosity, unease and passion. About love, adventure and society.
- What should I read after Northern Lights?
- If you liked Northern Lights, try Missing You (Harlan Coben), City of Bones (Cassandra Clare) and Northern Lights (Philip Pullman).
A taste of the feed
The joke about dating sites collapses when you remember each face is a life.
This was the flip side. It was easy to be cynical and poke fun, but when she stepped back, Kat realized something that pierced her straight through the heart: Every profile was a life. Simple, yep, but behind every cliché-ridden, please-like-me profile was a fellow human being with dreams and aspirations and desires. These people hadn’t signed up, paid their fee, or filled out this information idly. Think about it: Every one of these lonely people came to this website—signed in and clicked on profiles—hoping it would be different this time, hoping against hope that finally they would meet the one person who, in the end, would be the most important person in their lives.
Missing You · Harlan Coben
Being ninety percent certain is fine, until someone else does the arithmetic.
“You guessed? You must have been pretty sure, considering you could have killed me.” “I was ninety percent sure.” “I see,” Clary said. There must have been something in her voice, because he turned to look at her. Her hand cracked across his face, a slap that rocked him back on his heels. He put his hand to his cheek, more in surprise than pain. “What the hell was that for?” “The other ten percent.”
City of Bones · Cassandra Clare
A gift that looks like a compass but measures something else entirely.
It lay heavily in her hands, the crystal face gleaming, the golden body exquisitely machined. It was very like a clock, or a compass, for there were hands pointing to places around the dial, but instead of the hours or the points of the compass there were several little pictures, each of them painted with extraordinary precision, as if on ivory with the finest and slenderest sable brush. She turned the dial around to look at them all. There was an anchor; an hourglass surmounted by a skull; a chameleon, a bull, a beehive... Thirty-six altogether, and she couldn’t even guess what they meant.
Northern Lights · Philip Pullman
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