Random in Death by JD Robb (2024)

Book #58, In Death Series

A beautiful teenage girl drops dead in a nightclub and the signs point to a drug overdose. Called to the scene as a matter of routine police procedure, Eve knows at once this girl is not a drug user who accidentally overdosed, but rather the victim of a very sophisticated and cruel murderer.

As she begins her investigation, Eve finds herself more emotional than usual. Learning about the young girl’s big dreams for her future, her passions and talents, touches something deep in Eve. The girl reminds her of other teenage girls with wild dreams, including herself and her best friend Mavis, along with the daughters of her friends, the students at the school her husband runs. Her rage at life cut short for no apparent reason is enormous.

When a second beautiful, hopeful teenage girl dies in the same way, Eve’s rage becomes even more terrifying. Although it seems that nothing connects these two young women, Even is certain that a link between them will be found and that it will be their bright dreams of a better future will be what connects them to a killer who wants to snuff out that hope.

Payback in Death by JD Robb (2023)

Book #57, In Death Series

After more than 3 decades as an Internal Affairs police officer, Martin Greenleaf retires to enjoy time with his family. Just a short while later he is found dead in his apartment in an apparent suicide. Lt Eve Dallas arrives at the scene to investigate at request of Martin’s family and she knows immediately this was murder.

It is not hard to imagine that Martin — whose job it was to investigate and arrest corrupt police officers — had many enemies. In fact, he made so many that Eve and her team have to look into the lives of hundreds of people to start to narrow down the list of possible suspects.

The details of the crime are so specific that Eve begins to suspect that the murder was staged not to look like just a suicide, but rather to mirror a very specific suicide…one that she is certain will link bad to a case Martin investigated during his tenure with NYPD.

Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling (2023)

In 2049, as the middle of the century approaches, the world continues to burn. Global degradation and utter chaos have taken over, with high temperatures and catastrophic storms making most parts of Earth unlivable. For the very rich, there are small private cities that are protected from the elements and where fresh food and water are still available. For the rest of the world, they can only hope that a solution will be found to reverse the damage and, in the mean time, they all have a device implanted in their brains to distract them from their misery.

In this dystopia, we meet our 3 narrators: a young woman living in one of the private cities as a sex worker; the adult son of one the world’s wealthiest men, and a collective of all-female scientists living in isolation in the Arctic. Together, these three stories converge in a rugged, abandoned outpost in the northern-most part of Canada where two sets of delusional men are trying to find a way out of the environmental meltdown further south.

Encore in Death by JD Robb (2023)

During a fancy party in an NYC penthouse, surrounded by the rich and famous, a well-known movie star drops dead after drinking poisoned champagne. His widow, a famous stage actress, is shocked and terrified, knowing that someone who she calls a friend must have killed her husband in their home.

Enter Lt Dallas and her partner Peabody. The two detectives immediately begin to wonder why this (apparently beloved, generous kind) movie star was killed, indeed even if he was the intended victim at all. The evidence points to a meticulously planned murder at every step of the way, but yet it seems as if the man drank the poisoned cocktail by complete accident.

The two cops dig into the world of stage actors and movie stars, they learn of jealousies, grudges, desperation, back-stabbing, and sabotage and realize their are a lot of people that might have wanted a rich and handsome man dead…and an equal number who would want his wife dead. In fact, the investigation reveals that while the dead man was well-loved, that same could not be said for his wife.

Who was meant to die and, more importantly, why now? The detectives become convinced that the answers lie in the timing of the murder.

Femlandia by Christina Dalcher (2021)

Twenty years before the world collapsed, a group of radical feminists started to a commune in the middle of the Virginia mountains that forbid men from entering or having anything to do with the women who live there. Everyone thought they were crack-pots and assumed they would make it less than a year. They were very successful, but existed under the radar until all of the banks in the world collapsed, mass chaos erupted, and civilization fell to pieces.

Suddenly, women who are starving and desperate are trekking to Femlandia, begging to be let in. Not only are they willing to live without men, the horrific behavior of the gangs of men roaming the country has them thrilled to be part of a world where men cannot hurt them.

Femlandia has all of the amenities that the rest of the world has long gone without — running water, electricity, and food — but is also has many rules. Rule number one, do not question the rules if you want to stay.

When Miranda and her teenage daughter Emma arrive at Femlandia, they are thankful for a place to seek refuge. For Miranda, the rules and secrets almost immediately begin to unnerve her. Her daughter, however is immediately enthralled with the rules, the man-hatred, and — most of all — the group’s charismatic leader.

Like most sci-fi novels, readers know full well that while Femlandia might seems like a Utopia it most certainly is not.

Desperation in Death by JD Robb (2022)

Lt. Eve Dallas In Death series, Book #55

When the body of a young girl turns up in a New York City park, Lt. Eve Dallas initially thinks that she is a run-away who met a bad end. However, it takes just minutes to learn that the girl is the daughter of a wealthy family from Philadelphia who was kidnapped more than eight months ago. Even more confusing is the evidence that suggests, wherever the little girl has been since her abduction, she was being somewhat well-cared for, or at least cleaned, fed, and receiving medical care. The evidence also turns up one more clue: the blood on the girl’s clothes is that of another missing girl who was abducted around the same time from New Jersey.

It takes very little imagination for Eve and her partner to guess that the girls were taken as part of a human trafficking endeavor. What shocks both of the detectives is the scale of the operation that they begin to uncover, with hundreds of missing girls who are being groomed for sale.

An unsettling but powerful story that challenges all of the story’s characters who were traumatized as children and who know that it was only luck that kept them from such a horrific fate.

Upgrade by Blake Crouch (2022)

Blake Crouch — the author of Dark Matter (which I loved) and Recursion (which I did not) — is back with his third sci-fi novel, Upgrade. Set not very far in the future, in a world crumbling after a climate-change catastrophe has killed more than 200 million and destroyed the lives of millions more, mostly the world’s poor; we meet Logan Ramsay a scientist turned federal police officer whose job it is to locate rogue scientists using gene-editing for illegal purposes.

Logan hates his job but cannot quit: he was released from prison only if he agreed to help track down scientists acting illegally, a crime he knows a lot about since he and his mother worked on research that sparked a world-wide scientific crisis.

While raiding a lab Logan is exposed to a toxin that will nearly kills him and then completely changes who he is. The toxin re-writes his entire DNA, making dramatic improvements in his body and mind. Logan calls it The Upgrade.

For lovers of hard sci-fi, this novel has elements of Jason Bourne, the X-men, and even a dash of BladeRunner.

Glory in Death by JD Robb (1995)

Book #2, In Death series

As the series opens, we find ourselves in New York City 2058, a place filled with flying cars, high-tech electronics, and human-like droids, all while remaining recognizably gritty and crime-ridden. Scientific advancements have meant amazing improvements in medicine, transportation, and media; and modern social mores mean more acceptance of gender identity, sex work, and racial differences. But crime still happens, including murder.

Lt. Eve Dallas is working to balance being a NYC homicide detective and the girlfriend of the world’s wealthiest man. When a prominent city attorney is murdered in a gritty part of town, the media assumes it was a robbery gone wrong. From the start, Eve is certain that is not the case. The murderer seems too smart, too careful to have been committing a crime of opportunity.

Then another high-profile woman is killed in the exact same way and Eve knows that this is not about money, but about a murderer targeting women in the public eye. So, she turns her relationship with her boyfriend into an advantage and makes herself a media superstar, hoping to draw the killer to her.

Abandoned in Death by JD Robb (2022)

In Death series #54

When a dead body turns up at the playground frequented by Lt. Eve Dallas’s beloved god-daughter, the detective is furious. She turns her considerable attention, resources, and intellect toward catching the killer and finds quickly that the woman who has been murdered had her appearance altered by the killer before her death.

It is these alternations – which reflect styles more than 60 years out of date – that help Eve start to build the profile of the murderer. If the killer had left the woman in her everyday modern clothes, the police would not have had much evidence to go on at all. But vintage clothes, a new distinctive tattoo, and some very specific cosmetic enhancements help her start to zero-in on the killer.

When two more women go missing and another body turns up, Eve and her team must race the clock before more women are abducted and killed.

Forgotten in Death by JD Robb (2021)

In Death Series #53

While they are investigating the death of a homeless woman at a construction site, Lt. Eve Dallas and her partner are called to another crime scene just two blocks away. Here, they find themselves at another construction site looking at two more murder victims, but this time the bodies have been hidden for more than forty years.

Although the two crime scenes seem unconnected, Eve cannot dismiss the feeling that finding two sets of remains at two similar locations on the same morning is more than coincidence. In just a matter of hours, she finds that her instinct was correct: both construction sites have ties to Singer’s, a family-run business that has been operating in the city for more than a century.

Calling on a team of crime scene technicians, accountants, IT-experts, and — of course — detectives, Eve quickly identifies the more recent victim and ties her to a group who has been stealing from the Singer’s for years. She also asks for help from a forensic anthropologist to identify the older remains and finds that victim too has links to the Singer’s.

The victims all appear to have been killed to hide family secrets and Eve makes it her number one priority to find out what those secrets are before anyone else is murdered.