Blood Magick, by Nora Roberts

It's official: Nora Roberts's writing has reached peak laziness. Not only has she used these characters and situations before, she's used them before in this exact same combination. Seriously, if you want to read Blood Magick, just pick up a copy of her 2002 novel Face the Fire—it's the same story, but half the price.

Blood Magick is the final installment in the Cousins O'Dwyer trilogy. It's the love story of driven, beautiful Branna O'Dwyer, and her estranged love, Finbar Burke. Both characters are powerful witches, successful small business owners, and obviously super into one another, but their long-ago romance was doomed by the machinations of Fate (or something). The two share a close-knit circle of friends, all of whom have been struggling to defeat an ancient evil. While the group's previous efforts have weakened their supernatural nemesis, it will clearly fall to Branna and Fin, the most powerful of the bunch, to deliver the killing blow.

I am not joking about the similarities—if you changed the characters' names, the above paragraph would work just as well as a plot summary of Face the Fire. And I simply don't understand why Roberts is still churning these suckers out. She can't possibly need the money, and how much artistic fulfillment can there be in re-working the exact same material over and over again? At her best, Roberts can still take familiar plot elements and transform them into something fun, but if Blood Magick is any indication, it's time for her to take a looooong vacation. She needs to either re-charge her creative batteries, or give her readers time to forget the specific details of the earlier, cheaper, and frequently better-written work she's currently recycling.