Chesapeake Blue (Chesapeake Bay Saga Series #4)

( 285 )

Overview

Welcome to Nora Roberts’ captivating saga about the lives and loves of four brothers on the windswept shores of the Chesapeake Bay…

Chesapeake Blue is the fourth novel in a stunning quartet about four men bound by the love of the extraordinary couple who took them in and raised them as brothers. Now, Seth Quinn is finally home…

It’s been a long journey. After a harrowing boyhood with his drug-addicted mother, ...

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Chesapeake Blue (Chesapeake Bay Saga Series #4)

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More About This Book

Overview

Welcome to Nora Roberts’ captivating saga about the lives and loves of four brothers on the windswept shores of the Chesapeake Bay…

Chesapeake Blue is the fourth novel in a stunning quartet about four men bound by the love of the extraordinary couple who took them in and raised them as brothers. Now, Seth Quinn is finally home…

It’s been a long journey. After a harrowing boyhood with his drug-addicted mother, Seth had been taken in by the Quinn family, growing up with three older brothers who’d watched over him with love.

Now a grown man returning from Europe as a successful painter, Seth is settling down on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, surrounded once again by Cam, Ethan, and Phil, their wives and children, and all the blessed chaos of the extended Quinn clan. Finally, he’s back in the little blue-and-white house where there’s always a boat at the dock, a rocker on the porch, and a dog in the yard.

Still, a lot has changed in St. Christopher’s since he’s been gone—and the most intriguing change of all is the presence of Dru Whitcomb Banks. A city girl who has opened a florist shop in this seaside town, she craves independence and the challenge of establishing herself without the influence of her wealthy connections. In Seth, she sees another kind of challenge—a challenge that she can’t resist.

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Editorial Reviews

Library Journal
This is the fourth book in the Quinn family series that began with Sea Swept. Seth, the youngest, was ten through the original trilogy. Nearly two decades have passed, and the boy is now a man. A very successful artist, steeped in the romance of Europe, he returns home trying to outrun his past. Complementing Seth is Druscilla, who comes with the kind of family ties that bind and gag. She is a good foil for Seth as both struggle to balance feelings about family, albeit from different angles. James Daniels does an adequate job of bringing the series to its climax, but he has trouble getting the tenor of the characters: Seth is too breezy, and Ethan is too slow. But he catches Dru in all her uptight, buttoned-down glory. Nevertheless, expect high circulation; a necessary purchase by all public libraries.-Jodi L. Israel, MLS, Jamaica Plain, MA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780425262771
  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
  • Publication date: 8/6/2013
  • Series: Chesapeake Bay Saga Series , #4
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 368
  • Sales rank: 80430
  • Product dimensions: 8.18 (w) x 5.56 (h) x 0.98 (d)

Meet the Author

Nora Roberts is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 200 novels. She is also the author of the bestselling futuristic suspense series written under the pen name J. D. Robb. There are more than 400 million copies of her books in print.

Biography

Not only has Nora Roberts written more bestsellers than anyone else in the world (according to Publishers Weekly), she’s also created a hybrid genre of her own: the futuristic detective romance. And that’s on top of mastering every subgenre in the romance pie: the family saga, the historical, the suspense novel. But this most prolific and versatile of authors might never have tapped into her native talent if it hadn't been for one fateful snowstorm.

As her fans well know, in 1979 a blizzard trapped Roberts at home for a week with two bored little kids and a dwindling supply of chocolate. To maintain her sanity, Roberts started scribbling a story -- a romance novel like the Harlequin paperbacks she'd recently begun reading. The resulting manuscript was rejected by Harlequin, but that didn't matter to Roberts. She was hooked on writing. Several rejected manuscripts later, her first book was accepted for publication by Silhouette.

For several years, Roberts wrote category romances for Silhouette -- short books written to the publisher's specifications for length, subject matter and style, and marketed as part of a series of similar books. Roberts has said she never found the form restrictive. "If you write in category, you write knowing there's a framework, there are reader expectations," she explained. "If this doesn't suit you, you shouldn't write it. I don't believe for one moment you can write well what you wouldn't read for pleasure."

Roberts never violated the reader's expectations, but she did show a gift for bringing something fresh to the romance formula. Her first book, Irish Thoroughbred (1981), had as its heroine a strong-willed horse groom, in contrast to the fluttering young nurses and secretaries who populated most romances at the time. But Roberts's books didn't make significant waves until 1985, when she published Playing the Odds, which introduced the MacGregor clan. It was the first bestseller of many.

Roberts soon made a name for herself as a writer of spellbinding multigenerational sagas, creating families like the Scottish MacGregors, the Irish Donovans and the Ukrainian Stanislaskis. She also began working on romantic suspense novels, in which the love story unfolds beneath a looming threat of violence or disaster. She grew so prolific that she outstripped her publishers' ability to print and market Nora Roberts books, so she created an alter ego, J.D. Robb. Under the pseudonym, she began writing romantic detective novels set in the future. By then, millions of readers had discovered what Publishers Weekly called her "immeasurable diversity and talent."

Although the style and substance of her books has grown, Roberts remains loyal to the genre that launched her career. As she says, "The romance novel at its core celebrates that rush of emotions you have when you are falling in love, and it's a lovely thing to relive those feelings through a book."

Good To Know

Roberts still lives in the same Maryland house she occupied when she first started writing -- though her carpenter husband has built on some additions. She and her husband also own Turn the Page Bookstore Café in Boonsboro, Maryland. When Roberts isn't busy writing, she likes to drop by the store, which specializes in Civil War titles as well as autographed copies of her own books.

Roberts sued fellow writer Janet Dailey in 1997, accusing her of plagiarizing numerous passages of her work over a period of years. Dailey paid a settlement and publicly apologized, blaming stress and a psychological disorder for her misconduct.

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    1. Also Known As:
      J. D. Robb; Sarah Hardesty; Jill March; Eleanor Marie Robertson (birth name)
    2. Hometown:
      Keedysville, Maryland
    1. Date of Birth:
      1950
    2. Place of Birth:
      Silver Spring, Maryland
    1. Website:
      http://www.noraroberts.com/

Read an Excerpt

ONE

He was coming home.

Maryland's Eastern Shore was a world of marshes and mudflats, of wide fields with row crops straight as soldiers. It was flatland rivers with sharp shoulders, and secret tidal creeks where the heron fed.

It was blue crab and the Bay, and the watermen who harvested them.

No matter where he'd lived, in the first miserable decade of his life, or in the last few years as he approached the end of his third decade, only the Shore had ever meant home.

There were countless aspects, countless memories of that home, and every one was as bright and brilliant in his mind as the sun that sparkled off the water of the Chesapeake.

As he drove across the bridge, his artist's eye wanted to capture that moment-the rich blue water and the boats that skimmed its surface, the quick white waves and the swoop of greedy gulls. The way the land skimmed its edge, and spilled back with its browns and greens. All the thickening leaves of the gum and oak trees, with those flashes of color that were flowers basking in the warmth of spring.

He wanted to remember this moment just as he remembered the first time he'd crossed the bay to the Eastern Shore, a surly, frightened boy beside a man who'd promised him a life.

He'd sat in the passenger seat of the car, with the man he hardly knew at the wheel. He had the clothes on his back, and a few meager possessions in a paper sack.

His stomach had been tight with nerves, but he'd fixed what he thought was a bored look on his face and had stared out the window.

If he was with the old guy, he wasn't with her. That was as good a deal as he could get.

Besides, the old guy was pretty cool.

He didn't stink of booze or of the mints some of the assholes Gloria brought up to the dump they were living in used to cover it up. And the couple of times they'd been together, the old guy, Ray, had bought him a burger or pizza.

And he'd talked to him.

Adults, in his experience, didn't talk to kids. At them, around them, over them. But not to them.

Ray did. Listened, too. And when he'd asked, straight out, if he-just a kid-wanted to live with him, he hadn't felt that strangling fear or hot panic. He'd felt like maybe, just maybe, he was catching a break.

Away from her. That was the best part. The longer they drove, the farther away from her.

If things got sticky, he could run. The guy was really old. Big, he was sure as shit big, but old. All that white hair, and that wide, wrinkled face.

He took quick, sidelong glances at it, began to draw the face in his mind.

His eyes were really blue, and that was kind of weird because so were his own.

He had a big voice, too, but when he talked it wasn't like yelling. It was kind of calm, even a little tired, maybe.

He sure looked tired now.

"Almost home," Ray said as they approached the bridge. "Hungry?"

"I dunno. Yeah, I guess."

"My experience, boys are always hungry. Raised three bottomless pits."

There was cheer in the big voice, but it was forced. The child might have been barely ten, but he knew the tone of falsehood.

Far enough away now, he thought. If he had to run. So he'd put the cards on the table and see what the fuck was what.

"How come you're taking me to your place?"

"Because you need a place."

"Get real. People don't do shit like that."

"Some do. Stella and I, my wife, we did shit like that."

"You tell her you're bringing me around?"

Ray smiled, but there was a sadness in it. "In my way. She died some time back. You'd've liked her. And she'd have taken one look at you and rolled up her sleeves."

He didn't know what to say about that. "What am I supposed to do when we get where we're going?"

"Live," Ray told him. "Be a boy. Go to school, get in trouble. I'll teach you to sail."

"On a boat?"

Now Ray laughed, a big booming sound that filled the car and for reasons the boy couldn't understand, untied the nerves in his belly. "Yeah, on a boat. Got a brainless puppy-I always get the brainless ones-I'm trying to housebreak. You can help me with that. You're gonna have chores, we'll figure that out. We'll lay down the rules, and you'll follow them. Don't think because I'm an old man I'm a pushover."

"You gave her money."

Ray glanced away from the road briefly and looked into eyes the same color as his own. "That's right. That's what she understands, from what I can see. She never understood you, did she, boy?"

Something was gathering inside him, a storm he didn't recognize as hope. "If you get pissed off at me, or tired of having me around, or just change your mind, you'll send me back. I won't go back."

They were over the bridge now, and Ray pulled the car to the shoulder of the road, shifted his bulk in the seat so they were face- to-face. "I'll get pissed off at you, and at my age I'm bound to get tired from time to time. But I'm making you a promise here and now, I'm giving you my word. I won't send you back."

"If she-"

"I won't let her take you back," Ray said, anticipating him. "No matter what I have to do. You're mine now. You're my family now. And you'll stay with me as long as that's what you want. A Quinn makes a promise," he added, and held out a hand, "he keeps it."

Seth looked at the offered hand, and his own sprang damp. "I don't like being touched."

Ray nodded. "Okay. But you've still got my word on it." He pulled back onto the road again, gave the boy one last glance. "Almost home," he said again.

Within months, Ray Quinn had died, but he'd kept his word. He'd kept it through the three men he'd made his sons. Those men had given the scrawny, suspicious and scarred young boy a life.

They had given him a home, and made him a man.

Cameron, the edgy, quick-tempered gypsy; Ethan, the patient, steady waterman; Phillip, the elegant, sharp-minded executive. They had stood for him, fought for him. They had saved him.

His brothers.


—from Chesapeake Blue by Nora Roberts, Copyright © November 2002, G.P. Putnam's Sons, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

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Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
( 285 )
Rating Distribution

5 Star

(178)

4 Star

(64)

3 Star

(20)

2 Star

(8)

1 Star

(15)
See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 287 Customer Reviews

  • Posted Tue Jan 11 00:00:00 EST 2011

    more from this reviewer

    A Good Quality Ending

    Even though I've read this book before, I did go into it like I had never read it at all. Most of that was because I felt like this book (much like the one immediately before it) was slightly forgetful. Seth was and is still easy for me to forget because he is such a smoothly blended combination of his brothers that I feel as though I've read this story before. I know that the point needed to be stressed that he was accepted as a Quinn and therefore took on the Quinn attributes, but I think it lost a bit of the boy that I loved in the previous trilogy. In fact, his attitude was so like Cam's and the way he handled the various situations thrown his way was so like Ethan, that I thought I was repeating their stories. Of course, his high-class taste was from Phillip. Still, I didn't really get to see the vulnerability of the boy from before. I'm disappointed that he grew into too proud of a man to let himself get that way. Even Cam showed how vulnerable he was at one point and it was beautiful. Dru was also forgetful to me. More so than Seth. She seemed a lot like Sybill in that her money made her whiney and timid. Not my kind of female character, especially for someone so manly and tough like Seth. But I will admit that the way Gloria was handled at the end was very good. It made up for the anticlimactic ending of Phillip's story. I enjoyed the realistic approach. Gloria goes to jail and Seth realizes that she will probably get released and continue to haunt him. That leaves the ending open and raw instead of wrapping it up in a shiny package with a fluffy ribbon included. I know I had a lot of negative criticism for this one, but it was still quite good through it all. I just wish I could have seen more Seth and less of his brothers in him. But that's all in the eyes of the beholder. Either way I look at it, it was a good, solid quality ending to the series. One that I would recommend for a good trip into the male mind for a change.

    5 out of 7 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted Sat May 08 00:00:00 EDT 2010

    wonderful conclusion to a great mini series

    This series of four separate stories of the Quinn brothers and their growing families were a pleasure to read.As with most Nora Roberts novels, they are all can't put down books, that leaves you rushing to B & N for the next installment. Fortunately for me, they were available and I did not have to wait for Ms Roberts to finish writing them.Keep up the wonderful story telling.

    2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted Fri Jan 10 00:00:00 EST 2014

    Love this book

    This is the fourth in the series of the Chesapeake Bay saga and I couldn't wait until it was published. The entire series is great. It was especially wonderful to read about how the boy Seth became a successful man after his terrible youth as well as his brothers. I even cried a bit reading them. I love almost all of Nora Roberts books that deal with relationships and love, especially if they have a happy ending. Her description of the Chesapeake Bay area makes me want to visit there. I gave this series to my daughter-in-law and she loved them as well.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Fri Jan 03 00:00:00 EST 2014

    Highly recommended.

    Another beautifully written novel by Nora Roberts. The Chesapeake Bay Saga Series is another amazing series.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted Fri Sep 13 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    Read all Nora Roberts books

    Highly recommended. Loved the series!

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Fri Aug 30 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    Another example of Nora Roberts on top of her game!

    Have now completed Chesapeake Bay saga and enjoyed every page. Just keep the tissues handy for the tears of joy and tears of sadness. It's an emotional roller coaster ride.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Sat Aug 03 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    good read as usual

    Nora Roberts is one of the best!

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted Fri May 23 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    more from this reviewer

    This novel is the exciting conclusion to the four part Quinn ser

    This novel is the exciting conclusion to the four part Quinn series. In this last novel, little Seth is all grown up. Like his older brothers, he falls in love with an interesting woman while pursuing his career passions and trying to elude the cruelty that still haunts him from the past. The growing Quinn family fills out the story, and all readers that have made it this far will be pleased and entertained.
    Michael Travis Jasper, Author of the Novel “To Be Chosen”

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Tue Feb 11 00:00:00 EST 2014

    INTERROGATION ROOM #3

    Here

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Thu Dec 26 00:00:00 EST 2013

    La

    La

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Thu Dec 26 00:00:00 EST 2013

    To natilly

    I live in alaska.... how about you.... walks over and spread legs apart

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  • Posted Wed Dec 11 00:00:00 EST 2013

    Wonderful Series

    I've read this series before - I have it in paperback. The whole series is great, one of Nora Roberts' best. This is the fourth and last book in the series; they're all good!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Wed Dec 11 00:00:00 EST 2013

    Join the starclan where mprgan carly and pinkgorilla are helping me stop this madness


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  • Anonymous

    Posted Wed Dec 11 00:00:00 EST 2013

    Ethan to talie

    Goto res 4 of first love

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Sat Oct 26 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    Cc to andrew

    Hello there

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Mon Oct 28 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    Andrew to Cc

    Hey.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Wed Oct 16 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    Love it

    Always love Nora Roberts always look forward to her new books.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Fri Oct 11 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    Highly Recommend

    Out of all of the Nora Roberts "series" books that I have read so far, this Chesapeake Bay Saga Series has been my favorite!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Sat Sep 14 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    Jordan

    Sarah!! Im back!!!

    0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted Thu Sep 12 00:00:00 EDT 2013

    Sarah

    O.o "i have no idea. Lol, I just said the first topic and number that came to mind"

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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