Public Secrets

✍ Scribed by Nora Roberts

• Publisher: Bantam
• Year: 1990;2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 304 KB
• Edition: Bantam books trade pbk. ed
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0553386409

✦ Synopsis

Emma.  Beautiful, intelligent, radiantly talented, she lives in a star-studded world of wealth and privilege.  But she is about to discover that fame is no protection at all when someone wants you dead....

All she has to do is close her eyes and she remembers the day Brian McAvoy swept into her life.  A frightened toddler, she didn't know then that she was his illegitimate daughter or that he was pop music's rising new star.  All she knew was that with Brian, his bandmates, and his new wife, she felt safe.  And when her baby brother arrived, Emma thought she was the luckiest girl in the world...until the night a botched kidnapping attempt shattered all their lives...and destroyed Emma's happiness.

Yet now, even though Emma is still haunted by flashes of memory from that fateful night, she has survived.  She's carved out a thrilling career and even dared to fall rapturously in love.  But the man who will become her husband isn't all that he seems.  And Emma is about to awaken to the chilling knowledge that the darkest secret of all is the one buried in her mind--a secret that someone may kill to keep.

From the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Complex relationships among a believable ensemble of characters give Roberts's ( Sweet Revenge ) new romantic thriller much of its appeal. Emma McAvoy, daughter of a British rock star, is only six years old when her infant half-brother Darren is murdered in a bungled kidnapping attempt. Emma, the only witness, remembers little of that night, and while investigators determine that someone close to the family was involved, the case is never solved. Nagged by fears for her safety, Emma's father has her trailed by a bodyguard whenever she is not closed away in a private school. But as she grows up, neither guards nor a loving father can protect her from the nightmares and feelings of guilt that torment her. Nor can they shield her from Darren's murderers. Although it concludes with a satisfyingly gripping finale, the mystery is more a recurring element than a driving force, as the story explores the members of McAvoy's rock group, Emma's devotion to her father (who bought custody of Emma from her abusive, alcoholic mother), her destructive marriage and the father-son detective team whose dedication to the McAvoys and this case lasts more than 20 years.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Set to go hardcover?thanks to the success of last year's Sweet Revenge, which was originally released as a paperback?this 1990 romance features the illegitimate daughter of a music icon who discovers she has talents of her own.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.