Angels Fall & Northern Lights - Nora Roberts

Okay peeps, you have a few more hours to ask PC any questions and enter the giveaway. I'll update this post once we've drawn the book prize. The random numbers have spoken. The winner of one copy each of Marked and Betrayed is Shari C. Email me at nalinisinghwrites @ gmail.com (without the spaces) with your addie. :)

And onto today's post!

I'm a crazy, crazy fan of Nora Roberts writing as JD Robb, but for some reason, I haven't read a lot of NR's single titles. Well, I tell you, that is going to change! Last year I loved Blue Smoke, and just recently I read Angels Fall, and really enjoyed the characters, the mystery and the small town setting.

Afterward, I read some reviews (yeah, I do it backward) and a lot of people linked Angels Fall with Northern Lights, not in the sense that they're connected stories, but because they're both set in small, isolated towns. Since I loved that about Angels Fall, I immediately grabbed Northern Lights. I'm so glad I did.

They're two very different stories, with utterly different characters - however the sense of community in them both is so strong. But what really, really got me, is the way the locations are described. Angels Fall is set in Wyoming, and Northern Lights in Alaska. After reading these books, I had just such a vivid sense of time and place for both those locations that I could almost touch them. I'm not talking about chunks of description - it's all woven in so seamlessly into the story that the locations become characters, too.

I'm now a total NR fan, no matter which pen name. Time to start going through the backlist (rubs hands in glee). If you want to check out book descriptions, have a look at the Publishers Weekly reviews on the Amazon pages for Angels Fall & Northern Lights.

What's your reaction to the same author writing different styles of books? Any favorite authors who you only read under one pen name and not the other?