Montana Sky

Montana Sky was published in 1996 and is one of the stand-alone novels Nora Roberts wrote between the romances that made her a fixture of the bestseller lists. It is a family story first and a romance second: three half-sisters who have never lived together are handed a shared inheritance they cannot dissolve, and the novel follows a year of weather, cattle, hired hands and lawyers on a ranch big enough to hide what is going on at its edges.

Roberts gives each sister a different relationship with the land. Willa has been working it since she was a child and resents being told she needs help; Tess has a career and a mortgage in California and sees the ranch as a way out of both; Lily arrives with nothing and discovers that she is the one who is good at holding the place together. Their romances are woven into that work rather than separate from it, and the man who wants the Mercy land for himself supplies the crime strand that runs under the whole book.

The novel is one of several Roberts wrote in the 1990s that mix romance with suspense, and it carries her usual interest in women who are competent at something other than the romance. It was adapted for television in 2007 as part of the Nora Roberts movie collection. Readers who come to it from her shorter series will find a longer, slower book with a wider cast.