#MacmillanAudio Review of Legacy by Nora Robert narrated by January LaVoy

Today I'm reviewing the #MacmillanAudio version of superstar Nora Roberts' latest stand a-lone, a mix of contemporary women's fiction with a chilling thriller thrown in for good measure and it's soooo good. 
Enjoy!

ASIN: B08H8V21KC
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Release Date: 5-25-2021
Length: 14hrs & 57mins
Source: Publisher for review
Buy It: Audible

ADD TO: GOODREADS

Overview:

Number one New York Times best-selling author Nora Roberts presents Legacy, a new novel of a mother and a daughter, of ambition and romance, and of a traumatic past reawakened by a terrifying threat....


Adrian Rizzo was seven when she met her father for the first time. That was the day he nearly killed her - before her mother, Lina, stepped in.

Soon after, Adrian was dropped off at her grandparents’ house in Maryland, where she spent a long summer drinking lemonade, playing with dogs, making a new best friend - and developing the stirrings of a crush on her friend’s 10-year-old brother. Lina, meanwhile, traveled the country promoting her fitness brand and turning it into a billion-dollar business. There was no point in dwelling on the past.

A decade later, Adrian has created her own line of yoga and workout videos, following in Lina’s footsteps but intent on maintaining creative control. And she’s just as cool-headed and ambitious as her mother. They aren’t close, but they’re cordial - as long as neither crosses the other.

But while Lina dismisses the death threats that Adrian starts getting as a routine part of her daughter’s growing celebrity, Adrian can’t help but find the vicious rhymes unsettling. Year after year, they keep arriving - the postmarks changing, but the menacing tone the same. They continue after she returns to Maryland and becomes reacquainted with Raylan, her childhood crush, all grown up and as gorgeously green-eyed as ever. Sometimes it even seems like the terrifying messages are indeed routine, like nothing will come of them. Until the murders start, and the escalation begins....

MacmillanAudio · Legacy by Nora Roberts, Chapter 1

My Macmillan Audio Review:

Legacy
Nora Roberts

 

Master storyteller Roberts gives her audience a page-turning, edge of your seat, fast paced, generational and timely novel mixed with a chilling thriller in Legacy. And it’s not often that a title really hits all the marks for a novel and even though it will take readers/listeners time to connect all the plot dots to make that critical connection when they do bam it’s like a lightbulb going off.

 Roberts starts with a first-class stable of characters minor and major, her star, Adrian Rizzo, is an ambitious go-getter, an unforgettable, likeable, relatable, approachable character who surrounds herself with likeminded friends and associates. Then there’s her mother Lina who may or may not grow on readers but whose characterizations really work for her role in the tale. Adrian’s wonderful grandparents especially Poppy who the audience will get up close and personal with and rounding out the excellent are Adrian’s business partners and friends including her girlhood crush whose an all grown up a widowed father of two who also moves home to be close to family. The villain reveal doesn’t happen until close to the end, but readers will definitely be creeped out when throughout the novel Nora relates his/her murdering ways.

The storyline is right out of any celebrity’s horror stalker story but she takes a wonderful detour from the dark to cover the woman Adrian grows into making sure to include all the little mundane but critical happenings that makes life so important.

Fans of contemporary women’s fiction, romantic suspense and of course fan(atics)s of Roberts’ works will find this an up all night till you finish read.

Narration:
The narration by January LaVoy is exceptional she vocalizes every character perfectly from the kiddos to the crazies and all the other folks in between. Her child voices are especially sweet and she is the perfect Adrian.

 

Adrian Rizzo became a household name when she was the baby part of her mother’s burgeoning fitness Yoga Baby brand but that success led to tragedy when her biological father stormed into her home and is killed when her mother fights off his attack. Soon after her mother takes her to her grandparent’s home to live a normal life while, as Adrian learns later, her mother deals with the ugly fallout of the attack. 

When Adrian is a teenager in New York she follows in her mother’s footsteps and starts her own fitness brand but soon learns the dark side of celebrity when she receives her first death threat, her mother no stranger to these threats tells her to ignore them but when Adrian starts receiving menacing poems written by the same sick person on a regular basis she knows she has to pay attention. And when those threatening poems follow her when she moves home to Traverse Creek Maryland to be with her grandfather after her grandmother’s tragic death, she knows she must take action to protect those she loves and cares about.

 

About the author:

NORA ROBERTS is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 200 novels, including Hideaway, The Chronicles of the One trilogy, Under Currents, Shelter in Place, Come Sundown, and many more. She is also the author of the bestselling In Death series written under the pen name J.D. Robb. There are more than 500 million copies of her books in print.

About the narrator:

An Audiofile Magazine “Golden Voice” since May 2019, January LaVoy 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.