2025 romance/SF/mystery; 60th novel of Robb's In Death series (SF
police procedurals). A man is gassed to death in a limousine, for no
obvious reason. But the killer leaves a note that gets Eve Dallas
involved…
And this is very much a "sins of the past" book: it rapidly
becomes clear that the victim, and the killer, were part of an action
group back during the Urban Wars, and the other survivors of that
group are now targets.
Ah, yes, the Urban Wars. The first of these books, Naked in Death,
came out in 1995, and it may have seemed a safe bet to describe
something in the fictional past as "In the year 2016, at the end of
the Urban Revolt, before the gun ban". But the series has been
successful and Robb has carried on writing two books of it a year, and
here we are. I'd be interested to see if the romance-reading side of
the public (as distinct from the SF-reading side) had trouble with the
very specific mentions of dates here which make it clear that Eve
Dallas's future is not even superficially consistent with our present
day.
Anyway. it turns out that one of the potential victims is someone Eve
knows, and she gathers the whole group into her home as the most
effective means of keeping them safe. Because the thing that's
established early in this book is that this is a killer who thinks of
themselves as cleverer than everyone else (something we've seen before
in this series, most recently in Random in Death), and in particular
who over-complicates things in order to show off their cleverness—but
he hasn't gone up against competent police before, and Eve's
investigation rapidly makes it clear what's going on and who must be
responsible. (Finding and catching them is rather harder…)
The series inevitably varies in quality, but for me this is definitely
one of the solidly good ones.