In the new crime thriller from #1 New York Times-bestselling J.D. Robb, a small and easily concealed weapon wreaks havoc, and the killer is just a face in the crowd.
Jenna’s parents had finally given in, and there she was, at a New York club with her best friends, watching the legendary band Avenue A, carrying her demo in hopes of slipping it to the guitarist, Jake Kincade. Then, from the stage, Jake catches her eye, and smiles. It’s the best night of her life.It’s the last night of her life.
Minutes later, Jake’s in the alley getting some fresh air, and the girl from the dance floor comes stumbling out, sick and confused and deathly pale. He tries to help, but it’s no use. He doesn’t know that someone in the crowd has jabbed her with a needle—and when his girlfriend Nadine arrives, she knows the only thing left to do for the girl is call her friend, Lieutenant Eve Dallas.
After everyone on the scene is interviewed, lab results show a toxic mix of substances in the victim’s body—and for an extra touch of viciousness, the needle was teeming with infectious agents. Dallas searches for a pattern: Had any boys been harassing Jenna? Was she engaging in risky behavior or caught up in something shady? But there are no obvious clues why this levelheaded sixteen-year-old, passionate about her music, would be targeted.
And that worries Dallas. Because if Jenna wasn’t targeted, if she was just the random, unlucky victim of a madman consumed by hatred, there are likely more deaths to come.

My Review:

The case in Random in Death turns out to be, well, just a bit random. Even more random than I thought it would turn out to be. Which I’ll get back in a bit.

A young woman is having the night of her life. Her favorite band is onstage, performing a free concert just for the under-21 non-drinking crowd at the place where the band got their start. Jenna Harbrough a musician herself, and a dedicated one, and she’s hoping for the opportunity to give her demo disk to the band’s lead singer.

Because if he hears it, she knows she’ll get her shot at the bright lights, just like the members of Avenue A did twenty years ago.

It’s not hyperbole, or youthful wishing thinking. She’s got everything it takes to make it to the top. Except time.

Jenna is killed that night by someone who cares nothing for her, her dreams, her life – or honestly even her death. All that matters to him is that she is just the kind of girl who would never give him the time of day – just like everyone else in his life.

So he cuts her down and plans to do it again and again until someone finally sees him for who and what he really is. For ALL the possible meanings of that. He believes that when he’s finished he’ll get what he deserves.

And he will. Eve Dallas, the entire Homicide Unit of the NYPSD, and all of the people she has gathered around herself, are going to make damn sure of it.

Escape Rating B: Learning how all my ‘book friends’ were doing in this latest entry in the In Death series (after last fall’s Payback in Death) was the perfect read for me at the end of this week. This series is a comfort read for me, and my brain was pretty much TOAST. Burnt toast, at that.

But this is a rare case where the timing was perfect for falling into the familiarity of it all, but the book I fell into wasn’t. Perfect, that is.

The books in this series usually contain two elements, one being the case that Dallas and Company have to solve, and the other being what’s going on with everyone in their constantly expanding found fam.

This particular entry in the series was great – as always – on the found fam side of the equation, but the case, not so much.

Because the villain really was exactly what the kids who knew him claimed he was. He was a dooser. What’s a dooser, you’re asking? As did Dallas, Roarke and every other adult who became part of finding this dooser.

Dooser is one of those on the nose portmanteau words, in this case a combination of ‘dick’ and ‘loser’. Because he so very much embodies that combination. Which is what ultimately catches him up and brings him down.

And it kind of blunts the impact of his crime spree, because he’s just so very ‘lame’, to use vernacular that is closer to our time than theirs.

Because his victims were not exactly as random as we’d like them to be, at least not to anyone other than him. The case would have been more riveting if he’d been a bit more competent at it. Not that I actually want serial killers to be more competent, but once Dallas had one thread to pull his whole house of cards came down very, very fast.

The leading cause of death among women is men – and this is such a prime, chilling example of that. Particularly at the beginning, when it seemed like he was deliberately cutting down young women who are focused on their future careers and NOT looking for so-called traditional roles..

He wasn’t just killing them – he was killing their promise and their future and their possibilities and it seemed deliberate. Except that’s not what this villain cared about at all. Because he’s just a dooser incel who’s gone apeshit because he’s certain that he is absolutely entitled to the sex they’re not putting out for him – but are for everyone else. Hell, just for the fact that they’re not even noticing he exists.

So for all of his meticulous planning and serious science smarts, he was, in the end, just a loser. So it’s no surprise at all that Dallas put him in a cage. It didn’t even seem like it was all that hard to catch him, because he made so many mistakes from his very first murder. His crime spree was terrible, and the clock ticking was very loud, but he was such a loser that the mystery of the thing faded relatively quickly.

But it was still a whole lot of fun to see the progress being made on the house that Mavis and Leonardo are building to share with Peabody and McNab, that Jenkinson is rapidly filling the shoes that his promotion to Detective Sergeant entitles him to, and that there’s every bit as much romance – if not a little bit more – in Dallas’ and Roarke’s marriage.

And especially that Galahad is still very much, large, in charge, and all CAT. Just the way he should be.

The next book in the In Death series is Passions in Death, coming in September. I can’t wait to see what case and/or crisis Dallas and Company have to face next!

A retired colleague's suspicious death puts Lt. Eve Dallas on the case in Payback in Death, the electrifying new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author J.D. Robb.
Lt. Eve Dallas is just home from a long overdue vacation when she responds to a call of an unattended death. The victim is Martin Greenleaf, retired Internal Affairs Captain. At first glance, the scene appears to be suicide, but the closer Eve examines the body, the more suspicious she becomes.
An unlocked open window, a loving wife and family, a too-perfect suicide note—Eve's gut says it's a homicide. After all, Greenleaf put a lot of dirty cops away during his forty-seven years in Internal Affairs. It could very well be payback—and she will not rest until the case is closed.

My Review:

The case in Payback in Death is a fascinating one that could just as easily work in a contemporary police procedural as it does in their near-future world, because cases about ‘who watches the watchers’ are always relevant, and raise interesting questions about just how much of that watching is necessary and who watches the watchers who watch.

There’s a rabbit hole there that this story doesn’t have to go down, because retired NYPSD Internal Affairs captain Martin Greenleaf honored his badge and his service during a career spent on that often thankless watch.

Now he’s dead, and it’s Dallas’ job to stand for him. Because whoever killed him did a really poor job of faking his suicide. The man was murdered in his own home, and left for his wife to find. But fate intervened in the person of a detective that Greenleaf mentored. A detective who may have struck out once and badly with Dallas, but who knows she’ll bring her best to the case of the man who stood in for his father.

Which, in the end, is what this case turns out to be about. Father-figures, and the devastation they leave in their wake when they go down. Whether that happens in the line of duty – as it did for Martin Greenleaf in spite of his retirement – or whether it happens because someone like Greenleaf discovers that a man who should have at least been a hero to his family, was someone that those watchers not only watched, but ultimately discovered had feet of clay up to the knees.

Escape Rating B: At this point, I’m here to see how all my ‘book friends’ are doing after whatever happened in the previous book in the series (which in this case was Encore in Death). I just plain enjoy spending time with Dallas and Roarke’s ever-growing ‘family’ and am always happy to catch up with the gang. It doesn’t matter whether the particular case is all that interesting, and it doesn’t matter what kind of case it is. I just like these folks a lot and want to be sure they’re all still okay.

That being said, at 57 books and counting, the In Death series breaks down into three kinds of stories. First are the cases that are just cases – like the case in Payback in Death. It’s appropriately puzzling, the motives are twisted and the clues are deeply buried at first and convoluted to the end, and it’s an important case that requires that Dallas and company bring their “A” game to get it solved, but in the end it’s still just a case that gives the NYPSD a chance to prove they are the best at what they do – which they are.

The second kind of story are the ones where someone is threatening one or more members of Dallas and Roarke’s extended family. Those get messy. Always interesting, often revelatory about their pasts as well as their present, but those cases stick much closer to home and get more emotional, no matter how many of NYPSD’s finest get involved by the end.

And then there’s the third kind of story, which can dig itself into either of the above. The stories that are trips to the angst factory because they bring back the specters of either Roarke’s or Dallas’ horrifyingly terrible, thoroughly abusive childhoods. Those stories are always hard because I’ve come to care about all the characters a great deal and I hate seeing them suffer again in their present over the crap in their pasts.

This was a case that turned out to be just a case – no matter how much the perpetrator tried to make it more than that. And failed.

But it was still riveting and held my interest from the first page to the last because the story was every bit as relevant today as it is in Dallas’ time. Cops are human – and all of Dallas’ crew are certainly that, from Peabody’s pink coats to Reinecke’s eye-watering ties to Dallas’ own inability to make sense out of cliches and figures of speech – because they mostly don’t if you dissect the words.

Someone does need to watch the watchers, to police the police, to make sure that flawed human beings, because we are all flawed human beings including the police, don’t take the ability to use force and even deadly force to the point where it becomes perceived as the right to do so – because it isn’t.

Part of what made this work for me was the way that it went into the amount of painstaking work that was required to dig through everything that Greenleaf had been part of in a long career to see where the motives might be, no matter how deeply buried they were.

And that the investigation displayed yet again the reasons that Dallas and her squad are the best at what they do.

The part that cast a bit of a pall over the riveting case was that the ‘B’ plot of the story, the sidebar case of the now (former) detective who went off the rails and took a swing at Dallas, didn’t feel like it got either explained or resolved – or at least not to this reader’s satisfaction.

Which did not stop me from reading Payback in Death in a single sitting, as I often do with each, always much anticipated, entry in this series. Obviously, I’ll be back in Dallas’ early 2060s New York City for book 58(!), Random in Death, coming in January, 2024. I’m already full of anticipation!

It was a glittering event full of A-listers, hosted by Eliza Lane and Brant Fitzhugh, a celebrity couple who’d conquered both Hollywood and Broadway. And now Eve Dallas has made her entrance—but not as a guest. After raising a toast, Fitzhugh fell to the floor and died, with physical symptoms pointing to cyanide, and the police have crashed the party.
From all accounts, he wasn’t the kind of star who made enemies. Everyone loved him—even his ex-wife. And since the champagne cocktail that killed him was originally intended for Eliza, it’s possible she was the real target, with a recently fired assistant, a bitter rival, and an obsessed fan in the picture. With so many attendees, staff, and servers, Eve has her work cut out determining who committed murder in the middle of the crowd—and what was their motivation. As one who’s not fond of the spotlight herself, she dreads the media circus surrounding a case like this. All she wants is to figure out who’s truly innocent, and who’s only acting that way…

My Review:

This one is all about what Dallas refers to as ‘the marriage rules’. While that’s the way she thinks of them, they’re not exactly ‘rules’ and they’re not just about marriage. What she’s really thinking about are all the often little things about one’s life that change – or at least should – when another person becomes part of that life. It’s about acknowledging the effect that having another person deeply a part of your life and how things change as a result. It can be as simple as realizing that if you’re running late you need to text that person that you’ll miss dinner to understanding that you have to be present for things that are important to them and in all cases very much vice versa.

Figuring out what those ‘marriage rules’ are in her own marriage is a work in progress for Dallas. She expected to go through life alone – she certainly never expected to fall in love and get married to anyone, let alone to an ex-thief turned business mogul. All of which is pretty much the story of the entire In Death series starting with Naked in Death, 56(!) books ago and STILL counting.

In the context of Encore in Death, however, those marriage rules trip Dallas up. Not in regards to her own marriage, but in the way that she has come to see the world and the people in it.

When she’s called to a swanky party of Broadway and Hollywood glitterati at an even swankier penthouse apartment, both she – and we – are probably expecting something along the lines of rich people behaving badly until it gets someone killed. Dallas may be capable of setting aside her preconceived notions when it comes to investigating a murder scene, but the readers don’t have to.

But that’s not what the investigation turns up. The victim, Brant Fitzhugh, and his still-weeping widow Eliza Lane were the real Tinseltown fairy tale. They didn’t just pretend devotion – they truly were. And people didn’t just give lip service to the idea that Fitzhugh was a wonderful person – they meant it. No snide remarks, no catty asides, no equivocation. People really can’t imagine he had any enemies and Dallas’ investigation doesn’t uncover any.

There weren’t any money problems, there weren’t any financial shenanigans, both Fitzhugh and Lane were wealthy in their own rights so it wouldn’t have been about money and there was absolutely no extramarital hanky-panky on either side.

The widow, on the other hand, well, there were plenty of people who at the very least didn’t like her much. At all. If she were the corpse there would be plenty of suspects. Which is when, based on the evidence, it really starts to look like the literal poisoned chalice was meant for her and he was just drinking the wrong drink at the wrong time.

Dallas should be looking really closely at the widow. It’s textbook investigative procedure to look at everyone the victim was close to in search of their killer. After all, familiarity does breed contempt and there’s no one more familiar than a spouse or domestic partner. And that’s where those ‘marriage rules’ get just a bit in Dallas’ way.

Not that she hasn’t put plenty of widows and widowers behind bars for being the instrument of their late spouse’s becoming their late spouse, but in those cases there’s usually at least some inkling of trouble in not-exactly paradise. This time there’s nothing. Her bullshit detector is telling her that Lane really did love her husband and is truly bereft that he’s gone.

And that bullshit detector is totally, utterly correct. While leading Dallas and the investigation down the primrose path at the same time.

Escape Rating B: I was so very grateful to sink into the comfort of yet another absorbing case with Dallas and Roarke that I’m tempted to give this one all the stars because it was absolutely the right book at the right time for this reader, particularly after yesterday’s rant-fest of a book.

All things considered, however, this isn’t one of the great cases in Dallas’ career – not nearly as absorbing in itself as last year’s Faithless in Death for example, which was both terrific as a mystery/suspense story and as well as just showcasing how uber-competent Eve and her team are.

The problem, at least for this reader, with Encore in Death is that the motive for the initial murder feels like really weak sauce. All the crap that Dallas discovers when she finally starts digging in the right place showed a pattern that was considerably more interesting and diabolical, but the reason the initial murder happens and brings down the perpetrator’s whole lifelong house of cards was just a bit meh.

Not that it isn’t always good to see how Dallas and her whole team are doing, not that it isn’t always fun to visit that bullpen, and not that I’m not always happy to learn that Galahad the cat is still ruling the mansion that Roarke built.

It was also refreshing to read a murder mystery that doesn’t center on rich people behaving badly. While I do enjoy the schadenfreude of those mysteries, such as last week’s The Skeleton Key, too much of a good thing starts to get a bit stale.

All of that being said, I very much enjoyed my visit to Dallas and Roarke’s 2060s New York City, this isn’t the book I’d put in someone’s hands if I wanted to get them hooked on the series. For those of us who already are hooked, it’s a great reading time.

Dallas, Roarke and the gang will be back in September in Payback in Death. I absolutely plan to be there!