St. Martin's Paperbacks
Featuring: Roarke; Eve Dallas
384 pages ISBN: 1250846951 EAN: 9781250846952 Kindle: B092T8K767 Mass Market Paperback / e-Book (reprint) Add to Wish List
J.D. Robb returns with another thrilling installment to the In Death series. In the 54th book, Robb takes a darker approach to her book.
A woman is found dead in a playground. At first glance, she looks clean. Her hair is done and even her makeup is perfectly applied. But she also shows newer tattoos and piercings. A message is found on her that simply says ‘Bad Mommy’ as if a child had written it. As Eve delves deeper, she realizes that other women have been vanishing and they might be dealing with childhood trauma that has gone out of control.
As I mentioned earlier, I definitely felt that this was one of the darker books that Robb has written in this series. Since it deals with childhood trauma, Eve is affected much more because of her own trauma as a kid. The descriptions and the way Robb was able to weave this story shows her excellent skill. I was darkly riveted to the pages, but because of everything that was going on with the case, I felt like we missed a bit of the interaction between Eve and Roarke. Oftentimes, these scenes are my favorites of the books. So I would have liked to see more romance between the two to balance the other aspects of the book.
Nevertheless, ABANDONED IN DEATH is definitely not a book that you’ll be able to put down easily. Gripping readers by the throat, it won’t let go until you flip the very last page.
The woman’s body was found in the early morning, 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 The clothes, decades out of date.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.
Eve Dallas turns to the department’s top profiler, who confirms what seems obvious to Eve: They’re dealing with a killer whose childhood involved some sort of trauma—a situation Eve is all too familiar with herself. Yet the clues suggest a perpetrator who’d be roughly sixty years old, 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 discovers that other young women—who physically resemble the first victim—have vanished, the clock starts ticking louder. But to solve this case she will need to find her way into a hidden place of dim light and concrete, into the distant past, and into the cold depths of a shattered mind.