Passions in Death

July 29, 2024
Spunky New York City homicide detective Eve Dallas investigates a bachelorette party gone south in the anemic latest near-future thriller from Robb (after Random in Death). In 2061, New York’s Down and Dirty sex club is packed with partiers celebrating the upcoming wedding of marketing executive Shauna Hunicutt and street artist Erin Albright. The festivities come to a halt when the one of the brides-to-be is found strangled to death in the club’s private room. The brutality of the crime suggests a personal vendetta, so when Dallas and her colleagues, detectives Delia Peabody and Ian McNab, arrive at the scene, they waste no time interviewing the party guests, many of whom have known each other since high school. The case stirs up uneasy memories for Dallas, who was once assaulted in the same private room, and she fights to suppress her emotions as she parses Shauna and Erin’s circle of friends. While Dallas’s home life with her wealthy husband continues to offer a welcome dose of romantic fantasy, the circuitous investigation is likely to test the patience of even Robb’s most devoted fans. This series has seen better days. Agent: Amy Berkower, Writers House.

August 1, 2024
Lieutenant Eve Dallas is called out of bed to investigate the late-night strangling of a bride-to-be at her and her fiancee's joint bachelorette party. On top of her wedding to Fancy Feet shoe store manager Shauna Hunnicut a few days away, street artist Erin Albright is looking forward to something else: a surprise honeymoon in Maui, a trip Shauna's always dreamed of taking, that Erin's financed by unexpectedly selling three paintings. Feverish with excitement, Erin ducks into a privacy room at the sex club Down and Dirty to don her Hawaiian apparel but never comes out. Assuming from the get-go that "somebody Albright knew and trusted killed her," Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, question Erin's studio mates and the friends she shared with Shauna in search of someone who objected to her marriage enough to kill her--or a collector of her canvases looking for a quick and dirty way to drive up their prices. In an investigation that's unusually sharply focused for this futuristic series, Dallas and Peabody initially spend most of their time spitballing theories about possible killers and checking the alibis of the leading candidates. As the grind grinds on, things get distinctly more interesting when they narrow their focus to two favored suspects: Shauna's ex-lover Greg Barney, who's now the cohab of the brides' mutual friend Becca DiNuzio, and Erin's ex-lover ChiChi Lopez, a stripper who clearly enjoys displaying her body to paying audiences. They both fit the profile that consulting psychologist Dr. Mira provides to a T. So which of them did the deed--or was it someone else entirely? Steadily rising tension more than makes up for the absence of surprises. This is, after all, a procedural.

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August 1, 2024
While Erin Albright's bride-to-be Shauna Hunnicut and their girlfriends are shaking their booties at the Down and Dirty, a Manhattan club, Erin slips away to one of the private rooms to prepare the surprise she had planned for Shauna: hard-earned tickets to Hawaii. But a killer has a very different kind of surprise in mind for Erin, her fianc�, and the bridal party. Now lieutenant Eve Dallas and her crew must figure out who among Erin and Shauna's friends would want to stop their wedding in the most brutal way possible. To add to the suspense, Eve has to contend with memories of being attacked in that very same space. Robb (Random in Death, 2024) expertly engineers another winning combination of twisty plotting, turbocharged pacing, and memorable characters in the fifty-ninth stellar entry in her wildly popular In Death series.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.