The Liar, by Nora Roberts

After her most recent—and truly terrible—series, I was ready to give up on Nora Roberts forever, but her latest standalone novel, The Liar, is the kind of satisfying, sturdy, girl-power effort that drags me right back in. Curse you, Nora Roberts, and your ability to wrest away my hard-earned spare cash!

The Liar opens shortly after the death of Shelby Foxworth's husband Richard, who drowned in a boating accident. Richard had appeared to be a successful businessman, but when Shelby begins to wrestle with his estate she realizes their entire life was a lie—Richard was a con artist and a thief, and his death has buried Shelby and her young daughter underneath a mountain of debt. Shelby decides to home to her family in rural Tennessee, where she begins the long, hard process of digging them back out again.

95% of The Liar is devoted to Shelby getting her life back in order, and that's the kind of story Roberts does really, really well. The remainder, which focuses on the mystery surrounding Richard's past, is considerably sillier—Roberts has a bad habit of overplaying her villains, and the climax of this novel is predictably mustache-twirly. But that's a minor issue in an otherwise totally fun story, so I am officially adding The Liar to my list of Grade-A beach/airplane/camping reads for 2015, and sadly resigning myself to the fact that I will probably continue to buy Roberts's novels until the end of time.