Mind Games: A Novel

Nora Roberts’ talent for crafting engrossing thrillers, romances, and dark gothic mysteries is on full display in her latest novel, Mind Games. As twelve-year-old Thea and her ten-year-old brother Rem visit their grandmother Lucy in Redbud Hollow, Kentucky, tragedy strikes their parents and the children’s lives shift from Kentucky visitors to residents.

The night her parents die, Thea can see the murder though she isn’t there. She’s always had the gift; it scared her mother, but now that she is living with Grammie Lucy, who shares the gift, Thea has a chance to understand and hope to control what she sees and when. As she grows up, this ability to hyper-visualize manifests in a talent for video game design, but it also leaves her open to heartbreak when people don’t understand her gift.

When she returns to Redbud Hollow after college, she is determined to live as normal a life as possible with her giant dog Bunk, short for Rambunctious, just a few miles away from Lucy’s farm. In her home, she builds a life for herself that is serene… until it isn’t. Until she realizes her parents’ killer also has the gift, and he’s found a way to reach her when she least expects it. His intrusion threatens to upend her new life, and possible new love, if she doesn’t get a hold of him first.

Mind Games had me guessing right and left, and I rarely made the right choice. Roberts’ clever twists and surprise plot points kept me flipping pages well into the night.