Nobody’s Angel

Hegger’s contemporary series launch barely qualifies as a romance. Instead, it focuses on accurately depicting the difficulties of doing the ninth of AA’s 12 steps (“make direct amends wherever possible”) when everyone you know is stuck in the same destructive, puerile thoughts and behaviors they’ve had for a decade. Except for protagonist Lucy Flint’s commitment to her sobriety, nothing in Hegger’s characters would make a reader root for them, or even believe in their lasting happiness. With only the phone support of her sponsor, Mads, back in Seattle, Lucy returns home to Willow Park, Ill., to make her amends. She finds her father still abusive, her mother still codependent, and her old room untouched, like a shrine. Richard Hunter, the boyfriend she drunkenly abandoned several years before, has become her family’s doctor, moved in next door, and married her best friend, Ashley. But Ashley leaves him because of his continued obsession with Lucy, and as soon as Lucy comes home, she and Richard hook up again. The reunited lovers attract some unsurprisingly mean gossip, but even from their own perspectives, they’re clearly recapitulating high school rather than growing into anything new. Entirely unsatisfying. (Apr.)