Customer Reviews

Shattered

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I couldn't put this book down or sleep until I finished it! My heart was pounding and after I finished it I still could not sleep. It's been awhile since a book had this much physical effect on me.
I love the writing style, and am very drawn to the main characters. One can not help but "feel" with them (and for them )especially as some very sensitive areas were revealed.
If I have a criticism it would be that the end was a bit rushed- too many "facts" dropped in without enough support, and some key "evidence" thrown in that could not have been known, or quickly known, from skeletal remains, as was presented . I would have been happy to keep on reading and reading while all these details, and some secondary relationships, were fleshed out or resolved however!! I did not want to "leave" the world of this book or the charicters!

Karen Robards is a New York Times best selling author with over thirty books to her credit. I had never read Robards before Shattered.

Little Marisa Garcia is afraid of the woods near her new home. She knows there are shadow people hiding there - and they're watching her.....and she's right.

Fast forward thirty years. Lisa Grant has been assigned to work cold cases for Scott Buchanan, the District Attorney. While going through the file of a family gone missing - the Garcias - Lisa is stunned by a photo in the file. The mother of the family is a dead ringer for herself. As Lisa follows up with the case, it seems that someone is just as determined that she won't. Complicating things further are her feelings for Scott - their pasts are intertwined -will their future be as well?

Now having never read Robards before I had no idea of her writing style. For those who love romantic suspense, I would say - put her to the top of your list. She skillfully combines romantic tension with an interesting plot. I was happily ensconced on my couch for the day with a wicked head cold and was quite happy reading steamy scenes and smoldering glances. The mystery is really not the main thrust of the plot, more the vehicle to carry the relationship between Lisa and Scott.

I do prefer my mysteries a bit more convoluted, if you will. I did have the plot figured out before the end. The 'bad guys' are easily identified, as are the red herrings. But it was a thoroughly entertaining read for the day.

Fans of Sandra Brown, Linda Howard or Julie Garwood would enjoy Karen Robards.

It is hard to believe that Karen Robards wrote this. I love every book she has written, until this one.
The story line is actually very good, and at times I was riveted. There were some tense moments. However,
the writing is horrible. The sentences are so long that by the time you get to the end, you have to look
back at the beginning to see how the sentence started. There are way too many commas and unbelievably numerous hyphens. On the first page of Chapter One:
"He stood behind his battered metal desk--no expensive mahogany for this district attorney, the blue-collar man's
friend!--glaring at her out of light blue eyes that were, on this Tuesday morning, slightly bloodshot, as though he'd
tied one on the night before or, more probably, though she hated to admit it, been working until the wee hours."
What?!? This is not an exception; this is the norm for the entire book. In fact, it gets much worse. Some sentences even had the addition of parentheses thrown in. It was exhausting to read and re-read these run-on sentences. It totally took away from the plot.

Lisa Grant is a lawyer that right now is down on her luck but fighting to get back on top of her legal game. Her high profile job in Boston went bust with the economy and she finds herself back at home with her ailing mother working in the local District Attorney's office. Not just any DA's office but the one where her childhood heartthrob is now the boss and the one giving her the orders. Great luck for her.

But Lisa is a fighter and even when he banishes her to the basement to work cold cases she find a gem in the pile of lost but not forgotten cases. This one stands out because one of the victims could have been her twin sister and the mother most assuredly has similarities to Lisa that cannot be dismissed. But when she begins to look into this case too many things happen that no one can say coincidence. Her house is set on fire, she sees that she is being followed then knocked unconscious and that is just the beginning. Dealing with her mother's slow health decline is more than enough to cause her stress but now dealing with these thoughts stirring in the back of her head that perhaps her father may be part of the reason this mysterious family went missing and the fact that she looks so much like them. He has been mostly out of her life since she was a small child and regarded her as a blip on his radar but too many things are adding up wrong for her to overlook that everywhere she digs into this case he keeps popping up.

But always around and in her personal space is Scott Buchanan making sure she is not veering too far from the path he feels is right. He has desired her since he worked on her family's property so many years ago that even thinking about her was trouble. Now they are both adults and trying to hold back all the passion he feels for her is about to have him blow a gasket. He has tried for too many years to forget her but now that she is sitting right outside his office and causing trouble of another kind all over again he will have to take some kind of action. He knows better but his heart is leading his better judgment right now.

Once they get together all heck breaks loose and the attacks against Lisa intensify making her even more determined to get to the bottom of what really happened to that family. She has to keep her head clear of complications but Scott is one problem she knows how to handle and always has wanted to have in her life. Once they begin their relationship the fireworks go off brighter than on any Fourth of July celebration.

Pay close attention to this book because it moves as fast as possible with more twists than you think can be thrown into 400 pages. It also has one of the most romantic scenes ever written in my opinion. There may be more descriptive words involved in other books but the first night with Scott and Lisa at her hotel room is one for the record books of pure unbridled passion being set loose by use of the least amount of words with the most impact.

Mary Gramlich is The Reading Reviewer located at [...]

Rating: 2.5 / 5

I've been reading Karen Robards since not long after I started reading romance. She has some really great romantic suspense books, but unfortunately, her last few books have been subpar, in my opinion. And honestly, I considered this book her last chance at keeping me reading her new releases. Did she win me back? Probably not.

Summary:
After lawyer Lisa Grant loses her job when the firm she works for goes belly-up, she decides to return to her hometown of Lexington, Kentucky and help take car of her mother, who is in the last stages of ALS. Lisa takes a job as a researcher for DA Scott Buchanan. She and Scott have known each other for years, ever since he was the trashy son of a drunk who worked on her parents farm. Now he's a stud lawyer...with a grumbly attitude.

Lisa gets on his bad side and gets banished to look through old cold cases. Which is where she discovers the Garcia file - a young family disappears without a trace during the 1980's. But what's strange is that Lisa looks almost exactly like the mother in the photo. Lisa can't let it go and looks into the case. Bad things start to happen...a fire, an assault, a car accident. And through it, Scott becomes someone Lisa can lean on as she searches for the truth.

Review:
I was really hoping this book would be more like Robards's older romantic suspenses with a dynamic suspense plot and a great romance. It wasn't, unfortunately. I won't say that the book was bad in anyway. I didn't hate it, didn't have much trouble reading it. But it wasn't all that good either, didn't engage me anywhere near like what her older books did. Disappointing.

The suspense plot in the book is rather low intensity. It seems like it's going to be a really great story...missing family from years ago, a woman who looks like them, and other bits and pieces. I had high hopes it would be a great plot. But it never really pulled itself together. The story meanders at a near crawling pace that never really seems to get anywhere.

As the book starts, you get the basic situation and you expect a lot of investigating, fact-finding, discovery...all of it helping to put a puzzle together. But really, as the book moves on, you get very few facts added in. A doll, some near death situations, a couple other little tidbits, and that's it. Then all the sudden you get to the end and get blasted with pages and pages of narrative and dialogue explaining all that had happened. I mean, literally, it's a character sitting there and explaining like 20 years of events for five pages. Some of the explanation seemed to come out of nowhere, with no prior info leading up to it. Which altogether showed me a distinct lack of development throughout the book if that much had to be explained at the end. Plus, there aren't really any good clues to the bad guys' identity. That was annoying.

Also, maybe it's just me, but something seemed off about the fact that you have Lisa, a rising star lawyer at a good Boston law firm getting stuck working a job as a researcher. I mean, come on, are you really telling me that no where in the Lexington area she couldn't find work as a lawyer?

On the romance front...eh, it was okay. Very, very very slow building. For the first 250 pages of the book (its 388 pages long), Lisa is dating someone else, and Lisa and Scott just admire each other from a distance. Kinda dull. Then suddenly they fall into bed and then are practically glued to each others sides. I liked these two characters, and the romance had a sweet edge to it as the book progressed, but something was missing. I didn't feel very connected to these characters.

Another thing I found rather annoying was how the author would randomly toss out ten-dollar words in spots that seemed ill-fitting. Some of the words I didn't even know the meanings of. I consider myself to have a decent vocabulary and when I'm reading fiction for fun, I don't want to have to drag out a dictionary.

That wasn't the only writing issue, either. All throughout the book, there are these sentences that go on and on and on. There'd be sentences with multiple commas, hyphens, parentheses and all this info coming at you so that by the end of the sentence you'd completely forget the initial point. I'd have to stop, reread the first clause of the sentence, then read the rest slowly to get what the author was trying to say. Which, needless to say, is ridiculously annoying and distracting. There were also these long chunks of narrative that didn't help either. I wanted action and dialogue and more often than not got these massive page-long paragraphs of pointless narrative. There'd be like two pages of narrative describing a room. So boring.

So what's the bottomline on this book? It's not bad, really. I think there are plenty of people who would read it and like it. It just didn't do it for me. I think I'll probably end up passing on whatever Robards's next new book might be. I'll still read the few backlist books of hers I have waiting, but the new stuff...probably not.

I thoroughly enjoyed Shattered, this newest novel from Karen Robards. As another reviewer mentioned, the best part of this book was the relationship between Scott and Lisa. After having read some other authors romantic suspense novels and the very graphic and gory details given, I really was glad to read a book that contained less horrific deaths and more romance. Lisa and Scott were pure chemistry together and he was hero personified. There was a more normal feel to this romantic suspense, with Lisa's relationship with her dying mom as much a centerpiece of the book as the blossoming love between her and Scott. The third leg of the stool was the mystery: Lisa's cold case work at the DA's office and where one missing persons' case led. All in all, I consider this to be a fine work by Karen Robards and recommend it highly.

Emily Bell

I've read almost all of Karen Robards books, and have sincerely enjoyed a lot of them. This, however, was a terrible read for me and I forced myself to continue in hopes of it getting better.

The entire mystery/plot of this story happens in about 40 pages - 10 in the front, 30 in the back. The middle 340 or so pages feel like the the author is trying to develop characters, but she never quite gets there. Some of the minor characters (for example, Scott's brother or Joel) do whatever is convenient for the story, NOT what would be characteristic for that person.

And the writing is terrible! There are these long, run on sentences written in passive voice. Sentences could easily be reworked for better readability, or at least broken up into two sentences. Many, many times while reading a sentence that seemed to go on for an entire paragraph, I'd have to go back to the start of the sentence to decipher what the author was TRYING to say.

In the end, I'd skip this Karen Robards book. If you're new to this author, stick with some of her older stuff, like Walking After Midnight or Hunter's Moon.

i have read and enjoyed karen robards in the past and therefore felt comfortable ordering this book without having any reviews to refer to. for the first time i feel compelled to write a review.

where was the editor for this novel? from the very beginning i was struck by oddly chosen adjectives, unimportant information described in excessive detail and lengthy passages devoted to secondary information that neither enriches the novel nor assists in moving the plot along. unfortunately, the author spends absolutely no time crafting the central plot.

the cold case file with a 30 year old picture of a mother, who is a dead ringer for lisa grant today, and a little girl, who looks a lot like lisa would have at the same age, should be a promissing start for a mystery-thriller, but the author never developes a plot with twists and turns, "tells" and red herrings for the reader to figure out. instead, the family home is torched, the protagonist inexplicably has the feeling that it is because of the cold case file that she brought home and a series of attempts on her life begin without her having even made a first inquiry.

in place of a well developed plot and characters, the author spends the two final chapters simply describing the entire back story, all of the action we did not see take place (or even hinted at), and all of the motivation explained neatly. a total cheat. not surprisingly, these final chapters are tedious in their detail, but were clearly easier for the author to write than actually strategizing a plot with timing, reveals, motivations and mis-directions to engage the reader.

the author phoned this in.

Shattered so far is my favorite book written by Karen Robards. I could not put it down once I started reading it. The main characters Lisa and Scott, were the perfect heroine and hero, likable and had great chemistry together. This is one of the best book I've read in the last year and would recommend it to anyone who likes romance and suspense.

A mildly entertaining thriller that has trouble building up any momentum because of the endless and repetitive romantic interludes. If I'd wanted to read on every other page about Lisa's yearnings for her arrogant and unpleasant but oh-so-madly-desirable boss, I'd have picked up a Mills and Boon. Come to think of it, many of Robard's passages could have been lifted straight out of one. Personally I prefer my thrillers unadulterated. The story wasn't badly conceived but the characters never seemed very real to me. The ending was rushed and implausible, and left me blinking with the number of new facts that were suddenly introduced. A generally mediocre effort.