2024 romance/SF/mystery; 59th novel of Robb's In Death series (SF
police procedurals). At a hen party, one of the prospective brides
slips away… and is murdered.
There are some welcome returns for characters who haven't been
seen in the series for a while: the murder happens at the same club
where Eve had her own hen party (and was nearly killed) back in book
three. But mostly this is a surprisingly flat book: after the initial
evidence gathering, the case fairly quickly settles down into low-key
interviews and quite a small suspect pool, and then things just carry
on like that until the final few chapters. There aren't any additional
murders to lend a sense of urgency, though one can see how they might
have happened given time.
Of course the whole thing, the whole series, is copaganda, inevitably
for a light police procedural even as Robb is trying to break away
from the notoriously conservative tastes of traditional romance
readers. Since the vast majority of these fictional police are good
all the time, there's no need to worry about things like the way they
have keys to every door in the city, or taunt people into talking
before their lawyers can arrive.
But it's the book's job to keep things moving so that I don't have
time to speculate about that at least while I'm reading, and while
there is some solid character development here I didn't find the story
overall particularly engaging.