Conspiracy in Death
In Death, Book #8
J.D. Robb
Review brought to you by OBS staff member Heidi
In the eighth installment of the futuristic In Death series, police Lieutenant Eve Dallas is called to the murder of a sidewalk sleeper that had his heart meticulously cut out of his chest, with the precision of a surgeon, and removed from the scene.
Dallas buts heads with the first officer on the scene, Bowers, once Eve sees that the scene was not secured properly. Eve gives Bowers a tongue-lashing and the officer becomes insubordinate with her. Bowers later files a complaint with the department over Eve’s language she used during the encounter. Eve is upset that she has worked so hard to get where she is in her career to have another officer blemish her record.
Eve doesn’t let the police politics keep her from working her case though and they discover like crimes including ones as far away as Chicago and Paris. And as she gets closer to the truth she is confronted by a self-destructing droid that warns her to remove herself from the case or her and Roarke will be terminated. Of course that doesn’t stop Eve.
She is called to another crime scene where Bowers was first responder and they once again have a confrontation. It leads Bowers to filing more complaints and even going to the media claiming that Eve has slept her way to the top and has falsified documents and covered things up, even claiming her marriage to Roarke after he was cleared of murder by her was convenient. And when Bowers ends up dead the department has no choice, but to suspend Eve and do the worst thing they possibly could, take her badge.
Eve knows it was all a setup and that she was getting to close for comfort for the killer’s liking to finding out the truth. So after Roarke snaps her out of her funk she decides she has to help Feeney and Peabody solve the case and hopefully it will clear her name in the process.
I truly enjoy this series, but I have to be honest that this book was a major disappointment to me. They all can’t be winners I guess. To me this one had a very long drawn out pace. It didn’t get interesting until Bowers went to the media and that was past the halfway point in the book and it quickly got dull again a couple chapters later.
I think my biggest problem with the story was that all the suspects were so similar that they all blended in together not to mention she met most of them at the same time and I had trouble distinguishing one from the other, which made my guessing who the culprit was to be very hard.
There wasn’t as much steamy romance in this book as I’ve come to expect, but there was a lot of Roarke taking care of Eve and looking out for her, which is sweet.
My favorite part of the whole book was when Summerset was upset when Eve wouldn’t fight with him after she lost her badge.
“Unnerved, Summerset moved quickly to the communication center. ”Roarke, the lieutenant has just come in from outside. She wore no outer gear. She looks very bad.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s heading up. Roarke, I insulted her and…she apologized to me. Something must be done.”
I love Nora Roberts aka J.D. Robb and hope that the next book in the series is more to my liking. I completely understand in a series this big, there will be OK books, great books and amazing ones all mixed in, I just hope the next one is one of the latter two, after the short story, Midnight in Death, that was just kind of so-so, I’m due to be amazed!!
