Carnal Innocence

Carnal Innocence is a 1991 novel by Nora Roberts, published by Bantam Books.

Caroline Waverly arrives in Innocence to rest. She is a celebrated violinist who has exhausted herself with touring, and she takes her late grandmother's house with its covered porch as a place to think rather than as an inheritance to be argued over. The town, meanwhile, is dealing with a series of killings aimed at women, and the question the novel raises at the outset is whether the person responsible is an outsider in the bayou country or a neighbour.

Tucker Longstreet is the other half of the story, a local man with a reputation for short and shallow romances who recognises something different in Caroline. The book is a romantic suspense in which the relationship and the investigation run on the same track, which is the form Roberts was developing into a speciality; the gothic town, the summer heat and the class divisions inside a small community all serve to make the threat feel close rather than external. Before long the killings reach Caroline directly, and the man she has begun to see becomes part of the police inquiry rather than a refuge from it.