Just when you think author J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts) cannot possibly come up with something new for Lt. Eve Dallas to face - ABANDONED IN DEATH - comes out.
In this futuristic world with autochefs, flying cars, a billionaire married to a kick-butt cop, ABANDONED IN DEATH goes above and beyond what faithful readers expect.
Dallas' next case involves a dead woman found in a playground, nicely dressed and made-up in an old-fashioned way, with a note claiming she was a "Bad Mommy." Add in the evidence of imprisonment on the victim and the team is on the job. With no similar crimes, Dallas and her faithful sidekick Detective Delia Peabody must find the culprit before someone else dies. A couple of missing persons reports sends them in search of those women in hopes that if they are just being held, and that Eve and Peabody will find them in time.
ABANDONED IN DEATH will certainly hold you spell bound with your heart in your throat as this intrepid cop uses everything she has to solve the murder. Ms. Robb does a fascinating job in ABANDONED IN DEATH of giving you the past and the present in a way that allows some sympathy for the culprit but, then again, it is hard to feel sympathetic to a cold-blooded killer.
As always, the day-to-day interactions of all the characters in this world are fun, amazing, hysterical - especially the bull pen - as well as sweet, warm and steamy. Roarke and Eve live and work so well together and completely understand one another - especially now that Eve has grown more socially adept. She deals better with his billionaire world (when she has to) and with her team of cops. Any of the fellow cops would take a bullet (though bullets aren't outlawed in this world, you get the idea) for her without a thought.
In ABANDONED IN DEATH the bad guy comes out of left field, so totally unexpected that even Eve is surprised. The biggest star of the book is the one victim who survives. I can't say much, as spoilers abound - but she is one gutsy, savvy woman, who was able to play the villain's game, giving the heroes time to find her.
ABANDONED IN DEATH is filled with mystery, intrigue, surprises, along with the warmth, camaraderie, and the love that all add up to another winner by an amazing author.
The woman’s body was found on a bench in a New York City playground. She was clean, her hair neatly arranged, her makeup carefully applied. But other things were very wrong—like the tattoo and piercings, clearly new. The clothes, decades out of date. The fatal wound hidden beneath a ribbon around her neck. And the note: Bad Mommy, written in crayon as if by a child.
It seems clear the killer’s childhood was traumatic—a situation Eve is all too familiar with herself. Yet the clues point to a perpetrator who’d be around sixty, and there are no records of old crimes with a similar MO. What was the trigger that apparently reopened such an old wound and sent someone over the edge? When Eve learns that other young women have recently vanished, the case grows even more urgent—and to solve it she’ll need to find her way into a hidden place of dim light and concrete, into the distant past, and into the depths of a shattered mind.
No excerpt available.
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