2026 romance/SF/mystery; 62nd novel of Robb's In Death series (SF
police procedurals). After a burglary, the multimillionaire is dead,
and his secret vault of stolen treasures has had just one thing taken
from it. Eve Dallas investigates.
This is much more my sort of thing than Framed, the previous
book of this series. Rather than being about a serial killer (who must
in the end be a mad person doing this killing for mad reasons, which I
find essentially dull as a motivation) all the crime here is clearly
either rational or accidental. Though the decision between those two,
and the determination both of who committed them and of who shared
responsibility, is what takes up most of the book.
And for me that's the way to do it; we get some time with some of the
recurring characters, relatively few of them so that they each have
time to breathe, but most of the book is character-driven
investigation. It's made more complex by the fact that the last time
the missing item was stolen, when it ended up in the vault, it was by
Roarke, now Eve's husband, when he was a thief rather than the richest
man in the world; she may have come to terms with his past, but this
still sets up a sensible tension and reserve between them, even before
it becomes clear that someone at Interpol still has a file on
criminal-Roarke and would love to bring him down. (And there's a
character who appeared back in book 28 (Innocent in Death) back to
cause more trouble; you don't need to have read the series to
appreciate this one, but it's a welcome side benefit for the long-term
reader.)
All right, I would have thought that by now someone would have told
Robb that "zero-one-oh-two hundred" does not actually make sense as a
24-hour time. (No, they're not counting seconds.) But even so, good
fun.