2014 SF/mystery; forty-ninth (roughly) of J. D. Robb's In Death
series. Just before Christmas, a personal trainer is found in his
home, with a nasty head wound and a knife in his chest. He seems to
have been a thoroughly nasty person, but for Eve Dallas the homicide
cop's job is still the job.
The trainer, Trey Ziegler, seems to have been sleeping with
pretty much all his female clients in return for money (and while this
is a world with legalised prostitution, he isn't one of the Licenced
Companions who are allowed to do that). So did one of them kill him,
or one of their husbands or boyfriends, or one of the other people he
annoyed?
The suspects are established fairly early on, and most of them are
left in play for most of the book. I did find that one of them stood
out for me and turned out to be the villain, but it may not be as
obvious if you don't think the way I do. There are lots of mildly
unpleasant people, and some rather nice ones. The characters are the
real strength of this series, and they're thoroughly well-handled.
Some of the recurring cast also get a look-in; Robb is wisely not
trying to shoehorn all of them in this time, and this time it's
mostly Peabody (who, unlike Dallas, loves the holiday-season
feeling), and Trina the hair and body stylist who's one of the people
to find the corpse. Roarke, Eve's husband and the richest man in the
world, is more of a background presence, though he shows up for some
sex scenes and to provide moral (-ish) support. Eve is dragooned into
helping to organise his Christmas party, and while she doesn't exactly
enjoy it she does finally find that it's not the utter terror she'd
been anticipating.
Like Concealed in Death, this book downplays the science fiction
elements in favour of an old-fashioned mystery, and I think Robb's
stronger here than when she's trying to work at the more SF end of the
setting. I particularly liked the way the various strands of Eve's
life were blended: she doesn't get everything neatly wrapped up just
before the Christmas party, but has to go back and do more digging
afterwards.
What's perhaps lacking is a sense of tension: there's no build-up of
feeling that the killer's going to strike again, because it's
immediately apparent that this was a personal motivation. Dallas and
the other good guys never seem as though they're in danger.
One could start the series here, but a significant part of my
enjoyment comes from drawing contrasts with the earlier versions of
these characters and seeing how they've changed and grown. This is the
sort of thing that in a single book generally seems facile and trite,
but in a long-running series there can be small incremental changes
which add up to a major shift in personality.
Followed by Obsession in Death.
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