When Lieutenant Eve Dallas gets a call during her off shift, she knows something bad has happened. She finds a young woman with obvious signs of torture laid out on a white sheet in a park. Eve knows that this is the work of a man she was chasing nine years ago. He carves into the chest of each of his victims the length of how long they stayed alive during his torture. This perp got away from Eve before, she isn't going to let him get away this time.
This time, Eve notices a personal connection. The young woman killed was an employee of Roarke, Eve's husband, the sheet she was laid on was one of his companies, and the soaps used to was the victim were also from Roarke. Eve wonders if this means she could be a future victim. Working with her regular team and Roarke, they want to make sure that the killer doesn't get away this time.
This book is the 25th in the series, which I've been reading in order, so I've been reading these books for a while. Robb does a great job with character chemistry. Eve and her protege Peabody have great banter back and forth, and Eve's relationship with her husband is special. All the secondary characters have interesting chemistry as well. The biggest gripe I have with this series is that frequently, the killer has a personal vendetta against Eve. Usually it results in the killer trying to capture Eve and kill her. It is usually used as an easy out for plot to have the killer explain why he or she has killed everyone. Otherwise it's used as a way to get Eve closer to the killer. Either way, it always feels cheap to me and this is another book where the killer wants Eve. Thankfully most of the plot is sorted out before it comes to this so it's not as much of a buzzkill as it usually is in other "in Death" books.
First Line: "For him, death was a vocation, killing was not merely an act, or a means to an end. "
Rating:
(3.5/5)
Lieutenant Eve Dallas is called to a private school when two students discover one of their favourite teachers dead. What looks like an allergic reaction is actually poisoning even though Dallas can't find anyone that has a bad thing to say about this man. Dallas starts peeling back the layers of the school to find out what has been going on and starts to find some motive for killing when her prime suspect also ends up dead.
A young accountant and her fiance are tortured and murdered when Lieutenant Eve Dallas is called in. They worked for the same company and Dallas figures there must be a connection through their work that caused this to happen. The couple must have come across something at work that was worth killing for and Dallas needs to figure out what it is.
It's almost Christmas time and Lieutenant Eve Dallas gets called out to a Santa that's fallen from a building and crushed a pedestrian below him. While looking in to the illegals Santa was on, Eve comes back to her office to find Trudy Lombard, a woman who fostered her for a short time as a kid. It hits Eve like a tonne of bricks because there aren't fond memories. Eve tells Trudy to get out and goes home to tell her husband Roarke of what has happened. Not surprisingly, Roarke finds Trudy in his office the next day, trying to blackmail $2M from him to keep his wife's past from the media. Roarke doesn't buy it, threatens her, and she leaves. A few days later, Eve decides that she needs to meet Trudy herself and tell her to never contact them again. What she finds is that Trudy is dead, her head bashed in.
Lieutenant Eve Dallas is in the same building as a murder, when it happens, so she arrives on scene quickly to find Dr. Icove Sr. with a scalpel in his heart. On the surface, Dr. Icove looks like a squeeky clean plastic surgeon. But Eve knows no one can be that clean and starts to dig deeper. While she wonders where Icove is spending his free time, she finds some encrypted patient files on his computer. All of the patients are female, in the same age range, and labelled by a letter and number rather than a name. As Eve begins to investigate this even further, Dr. Icove's son is killed in a similar manner. Eve knows that the two were working on something illegal and needs to figure it out quickly before more people are killed.
Nine year old Nixie Swisher was in her kitchen getting an orange fizzy when her entire family was murdered in their sleep. She too was supposed to be killed, but getting that drink saved her life. Lieutenant Eve Dallas gets the case and keeps Nixie safe in her house while she hunts for the killers. Eve isn't very good with kids, adding to her stress as she tried to piece together the puzzle. This murder seemed harder for her to solve than some previous ones. The team had to grind data a bit more than usual, but that helped made the story more believable.
This book contains two stories.
Three great novellas in the In Death series (7.5,12.5, 22.5)
Lieutenant Eve Dallas' husband Roarke is called by his secretary to help her daughter Reva. Reva went over to her best friend's house to confront her for sleeping with her husband and instead finds the two of them in bed, dead. She gets knocked out and framed for the murder, but Dallas quickly sees past that. Who would set up a wife to take the fall for her husband and mistress? When Dallas finds out that both the husband and the mistress were Homeland employees, everything changes. Dallas also learns some things about her past when she opens up some files though and it's something that affects both her and Roarke.