Lieutenant Eve Dallas continues to prove she's the best homicide detective around in ABANDONED IN DEATH, in the NY Times bestseller J.D. Robb (aka Nora Roberts) series In Death. This is book number 54 in this long-running futuristic detective series set in New York City in 2061. Robb continues to write engaging and fun who-done-it’s with plenty of panache.
Eve Dallas has to be one of my favorite book protagonists. As you’d expect a long term NYC cop to be, she’s grumpy and cynical. Yet Eve has the proverbial hear of gold underlying her cranky exterior, as well as enough little quirks to make her totally endearing. Eve’s uber-rich husband Roarke continues to play an outsized role in her investigations. It’s never really made sense to me why a man who owns half the planet knows so many details about small businesses that he owns, or is willing to take vast amounts of time away from running his massive business empire to help his wife with electronics investigation, crime suspect interviewing, or just hanging around murder scenes. But I just shrug and enjoy the sexiness that is the competent and supportive Irish dreamboat he is.
Much of the joy of these books is the large cast of beloved secondary characters. Eve’s circle of friends continues to grow over the series, and her partner Peabody gets the most page time in addition to Eve and Roarke. But Eve’s close friends and coworkers, such as her pregnant best friend who’s a video megastar, or the nattily-dressed head coroner, shine in their spots of the vast stage of well-fleshed out characters.
The murders of women who are a stand-in for the criminals “Bad Mommy” are just interesting enough to keep the reader engaged, but the meat of the book is watching Eve and Roarke, along with her coworkers, work together in crime scenes and in their outside lives. The love between Eve and Roarke remains a joy to experience and adds a beautiful note of sweetness amongst the gritty crimes and funny snark. Robb’s ABANDONED IN DEATH brings us another pleasing investigative procedural with lots of found family, support, and a smidgen of romance.
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 The clothes, decades out of date.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.
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