I have resisted reading Nora Roberts’ novels because I tend to read primarily historical romance. As both a contemporary novel and a something of a thriller, Homeport is not the kind of romance I would normally pick up. But any novel about winter in Maine seems appealing when it is already ninety degrees outside in North Carolina. The promise of cozy cuddle-in-front-of-the-fire-winter-in-Maine scenes became too much to resist. So I dove right in.

Miranda Jones leads a complicated life. She is a successful, ambitious academic whose dysfunctional family relationships only enable her professional success. She has an icily professional mother, an absent father, and an alcoholic brother determined to drink himself to death over a failed marriage. To make matters more (or less) complicated, everyone she knows is in the business of buying, studying, finding, or scientifically identifying art. While this provides Miranda with a somewhat insular world, it is the only reality Miranda knows and when events conspire to cast her beyond the circle of these experts, she is driven to make choices that would have been fully unacceptable to her under other, less extreme circumstances.

But such is the stuff of romance novels – these pressures, changes and choices. And of course, at the heart of all these choices, lies the man who wants to teach Miranda to see people as well as to see art.

As the novel opens, Miranda is mugged in the driveway of her own home. It is strange that no one gives this more attention-this is a sleepy town in Maine, after all, not New York City. But after briskly downplaying any trauma, and replacing her stolen passport and identification, Miranda journeys to Florence to authenticate a de Medici bronze at the behest of her mother. But although the bronze may be exactly what everyone thinks it is, the situation surrounding the work of art takes several quick turns and Miranda finds herself dismissed from the lab, with her professional reputation in questionable shape, and without the ability to do anything to defend herself.

Enter Ryan Boldari to begin the thaw. Against her better judgement, Miranda finds herself attracted to Boldari, a situation that becomes even more complicated when she is forced by circumstances to work with the accomplished art thief to save her own reputation and ultimately solve what is becoming an increasing violent plot against her life.

Roberts evokes a living woman in Miranda, someone shaped by the loveless, demanding environment of her childhood to become a high achieving adult, but a woman still seeking the approval her parents will never give her. Her attraction to Ryan is believable not just because he is drop dead gorgeous, wealthy, cultured, and good with a pick in a lock, but also because he is emotionally available to her. The brief scene with his large and boisterous Italian/Irish family may border on the precious, but it does serve to flesh out this aspect of Ryan’s appeal. He understands family. He can give Miranda what she needs if she can unbend enough to ask him for it. And her journey toward that unbending is tentative and painfully real.

The rest of the novel ranges from the technically proficient (scenes of Florence, scenes of cliffs, scenes of New York) to the somewhat predictable (the Latin lover, the computer geek, the dogged detective) to the patently absurd (the reader will need to believe that Miranda’s father, a smart enough man to have founded the Jones enterprises, will not realize Ryan is the same man when introduced by her under two different names). But ultimately I forgave these flaws, both because I am a sucker for the smooth execution of high tech robbery in fiction or in the movies and because the scenes between Miranda and Ryan, which comprise most of the book, are well written and believable.

I began the novel with few expectations and Homeport exceeded most of them. The novel is well paced and Miranda’s character develops and changes through the increasingly coiled situation she fights to resolve. And for all the blowing cold air of the landscape, the family, and at times even Miranda herself, when she does finally melt into Ryan’s arms, the heat rising off the pages puts summer in North Carolina to shame.