Rating: 3.5 stars
Spoiler warning! This is book 29 in the series, it's not necessarily the best place to start.
Eve Dallas has a couple of days off due to a national holiday and is planning on spending it with her gajillionaire husband Roarke. But murder doesn't take days off, and when Eve is specifically requested to lead a case, she neither can nor wants to refuse. A newly promoted police captain whom Eve has worked with in the past returned home from a weekend away with his wife to find their teenage daughter tied up, sexually violated, and brutally murdered in her own bed. The crime is an especially gruesome one, and the abuse and violence cannot help but remind Eve of her own dark past.
The security at the captain's house was state of the art, and his daughter, while innocent in many ways, was also the daughter of a cop, so didn't trust easily. She wouldn't have let a stranger into the house, yet as far as her parents knew, she didn't have a boyfriend and would never have arranged to have a party or similar while they were away. It's not an easy thing to track down a murder suspect, let alone figure out the motive for such a gruesome crime. After another young woman, a realtor is found similarly murdered in an apartment she was showing to a potential buyer, the clues start to add up, and while the murderer might think he's clever and untraceable, Eve Dallas and her team aren't going to rest until they track him down and deliver justice to the grieving families.
There's also a subplot with Eve's friend Louise getting married and her being completely puzzled by the many duties she's supposed to perform as the matron of honour. Thankfully, she has the trusty Peabody to assist her, both with professional duties and to navigate tricky social situations she doesn't entirely understand.
It's been years since I read an In Death book, but since they're basically like self-contained episodes of a familiar police procedural series, it wasn't exactly difficult to slip back into the series. Even if I only vaguely remember some of the characters mentioned, as a reader, you've given enough information to be able to follow along.
It wasn't like I liked reading about bad things happening to children even before I had one of my own, but since I became a mother, I tend to react very badly to children in peril. The first victim in this story is only sixteen, and more pertinently, is her parents' only child. I fight the anxiety of something bad happening to my little boy all the time, and reading about a couple losing their only daughter was difficult. One of the reasons I've not read as many mystery and suspense novels in the past decade or so is that I just cannot emotionally deal with the sort of harrowing crimes that are often depicted in these novels, whether they involve children or not. It seems like the victims are predominantly women, and that there may be sexual violence involved, which is just deeply depressing to read about.
Nevertheless, it was fun to revisit the futuristic world of Robb's future New York (even though I find it highly implausible that the soft drink of choice in the future will be Pepsi), and since I'm planning on mood reading a lot more next year, I'll probably read a few more of them.
Judging a book by its cover: Obviously, considering how long J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts has been writing these books, they've had a number of cover redesigns over the years. The one I read had the block of a solid colour on top - in this case a delicate yellow, not sure if it is a good fit considering the horrible crimes committed in the book - and a series of images that are connected to the plot in some way on the bottom. Apart from the running woman (the first victim liked to run in the park), I'm not sure what the ones here are supposed to represent.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read
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