Review copy was received from NetGalley. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Hidden Nature by Nora Roberts Narrator: January LaVoy
Published by MacMillan Audio, St. Martin's Press on May 27, 2025
Genres: Romantic Suspense
Pages: 448
Length: 14 hours, 30 minutes
Format: Audiobook, eARC
Source: NetGalley
Goodreads
Amazon, Audible, Libro.fm, Barnes & Noble, Apple
Natural Resources police officer, Sloan Cooper, and her partner had just taken down three men preying on hikers in the Western Maryland mountains. Driving back, she pulled in at a convenience store—and walked right into a robbery in progress. One gunshot from a jittery thief was about to change her world.
After being shocked back to life on the operating table, she has a long recovery ahead, so she moves back to her parents’ peaceful house in Heron’s Rest. As for the boyfriend who dumped her via text while she was in the hospital, good riddance.
She may be down, but she’s not out. So when a woman vanishes, leaving her car behind in a supermarket parking lot, Sloan searches online for similar cases. She finds them, spread across three states. Men and women, old and young—the missing seem to have nothing in common. And the abductions keep happening.
Nora Roberts and January LaVoy are a favorite combination of excellent work. Romantic suspense is a favorite genre with the multiple emotional pulls from the romance and the suspense and thrill of the mystery. Hidden Nature has many other great themes with families, home renovation work, good cooking, gardening, natural resource law enforcement and dogs.
The characters are so likeable and have great growth in both their careers and their personal relationships (bad guys not included). The brothers are leaving the city and paperwork jobs to work with building and fixing things. Nash and Theo are are making a new life and start together. Theo has always wanted a dog so Nash gets him one.
Sloan stays with her parents during her recuperation after being shot. She walks with their dog, builds her strength and enjoys the outdoor beauty of the area. She has missed her family and the mountains. A case starts right when she is hurt where a woman has been abducted from a parking lot the day before Thanksgiving. So it becomes her project to keep her mind busy as she gets better.
Sloan gets offered a promotion staying right there with the nature resources police and decides to take it. She buys a cottage near her parents and starts renovating it with help from her Dad and her new next door neighbors, Nash and Theo.
Sloan and Nash get close. He is a good listener as she gets more ideas and connects more abductions to the woman at Thanksgiving. I love the smart deductions she makes. We get to see the villains too. Yeah, they are looney tunes. I love all the home renovations Sloan does on her cottage and Nash does on his home and for clients.
I just loved so many aspects of Hidden Nature and highly recommend it.
Narration:
January LaVoy is a favorite narrator. As usual, I really enjoyed her performance of all the voices. They were distinct enough for me to recognize characters and comfortably appropriate. I was able to listen at my usual 1.5x speed.
Listen to a clip:Â HERE
About January LaVoy
photo: Scott Sherratt
January (she/her) is an Atlanta-based actress, best known for her role as Noelle Ortiz-Stubbs on the long-running ABC daytime drama ONE LIFE TO LIVE. She has appeared on and Off-Broadway, in regional theaters across the country, and guest starred on several prime time network series, including Elementary, Blue Bloods, and N0S4A2. She is a proud member of Actors’ Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA, and was a faculty member in the Department of Theater and Dance at Emory University from 2019-2021.
An Audiofile Magazine “Golden Voice” since May 2019, January has an extensive body of work in both narration and commercial voiceover. With hundreds of audiobook titles to her credit, she has received more than thirty Earphones Awards, eighteen Audie Award nominations (including seven wins), and was named Publishers Weekly’s “Audiobook Narrator of the Year” for 2013. Her voice has been heard in national campaigns for dozens of products, and she shares a 2020 Grammy nomination with Meryl Streep and the cast of the Charlotte’s Web audiobook, in which she plays the title role of Charlotte.
About Nora Roberts
Nora Roberts was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, the youngest of five children. She married young and settled in Keedysville, Maryland where she worked briefly as a legal secretary. After her sons were born she stayed home and tried every craft that came along. A blizzard in February 1979 forced her hand to try another creative outlet. She was snowed in with a three and six year old.
Born into a family of readers, Nora had never known a time that she wasn’t reading or making up stories. During the now-famous blizzard, she pulled out a pencil and notebook and began to write down one of those stories. It was there that a career was born. Several manuscripts and rejections later, her first book, Irish Thoroughbred, was published by Silhouette in 1981.
Nora met her second husband, Bruce Wilder, when she hired him to build bookshelves. They were married in July 1985. Since that time, they’ve expanded their home, traveled the world and opened a bookstore together.
Through the years, Nora has always been surrounded by men. Not only was she the youngest in her family, but she was also the only girl. She has raised two sons. Having spent her life surrounded by men, Ms. Roberts has a fairly good view of the workings of the male mind, which is a constant delight to her readers. It was, she’s been quoted as saying, a choice between figuring men out or running away screaming.
Nora is a member of several writers groups and has won countless awards from her colleagues and the publishing industry. Recently The New Yorker called her “America’s favorite novelist.”
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I read all types of books but my favorites are urban fantasy and romantic suspense.I like some romance and some action / adventure / mystery in everything.I like sex in my books but please, only between TWO people.Intimate conversation is equally important to the sex in a book.It lets me see the characters.The other thing I enjoy is humor.
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Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
- 25-COYER
This seems like its packed with so many different things. Home renovation and crime? I think I’d love it.
Thanks Tammy. I did love it.
Those do sound like some enjoyable themes in a romantic suspense. I’ve got a couple of her older books you remind me I need to get to.
yes Sophia. I have collected audio books of 20 or so of her older books (not at libraries) I could read anytime now. lol
I love this narrator, but devoured this well before the audio came out. Wonderful review!
yes it’s always hard to decide. With the In Death books I read ebooks because the narrator is someone else in my head. But these I could go either way.
I may try a Nora Roberts again someday. I just struggle with her stuff.
I guess it depends on why you struggle. She writes a variety of genres actually. I like the newer romantic suspense and the In Death books.
I’m currently working through her J.D. Robb In Death books – though I’ve a LOT to get through. Though I always enjoy them whenever I pick them up. This one sounds entertaining and readable – thank you for a great review:).
I love the In Death and I’ve read them all. In fact I just got the eARC for the one this fall and I intend to read it as soon as I get a moment. But I always enjoy her newer romantic suspense like this one A LOT.
I really enjoyed this one too! The contrast before the super creepy bad guys and the nice people who peopled Sloan’s life was really good.
yes there were a lot of aspects that I enjoyed here.
I’m listening to this one and I agree the combo of Nora Roberts and January LaVoy is a great one. The villains are super creepy! Gives me the chills!
Creepy is right. I’m not a fan of killers who think they are “special” and cosplay god.
One of my stepmom’s favorite authors! And I think she listens to the audiobooks now too. Great review!
Thank you. Do you not re3ad romantic suspense? The romances are great, just not the only plot.
I’m not really a fan of romantic suspense.
This one was a bit slow for me. My favourite parts were Nash and Sloane. I enjoyed the villains’ viewpoints too and how they progressed.
I’m a bigger fan of home renovation and gardening than some people. The villains were creepy.