SALVATION IN DEATH
J. D. Robb
Putnam Adult
Thriller
ISBN: 9780399155222
SALVATION IN DEATH is the 27th installment in J. D. Robb’s In Death series featuring Detective Lieutenant Eve Dallas. What sets these books apart from the standard mystery/thriller fare is that they take place in the mid-21st century. Robb does not fancy herself to be Victor Appleton, or even Larry Niven; her New York of some four decades removed is comfortably familiar yet teasingly exotic. Computers are more user-friendly, cell phones are a bit more convenient, sodas come in tubes and emergency vehicles can levitate for short distances to avoid traffic jams. And dangerous criminals? Well, you’ll have to read this book to find out.
While the series is aimed primarily at women (Dallas is married to Roarke, an enigmatic, almost too perfect gentleman who is richer than God and to whom no mere mortal man will ever measure up), there is more than enough mystery, suspense and action to keep men entertained as well. What ultimately makes the series a winner is the manner in which Robb takes a number of disparate elements to create a genre-bending work that intrigues, titillates and stimulates.
At the start of SALVATION IN DEATH, Father Miguel Flores, a popular assistant pastor at St. Cristobal’s Catholic Church in Spanish Harlem, drops dead in the middle of a funeral mass, the apparent victim of poisoning. Dallas slowly but surely uncovers that he was not who he was supposed to be; he was, in fact, someone else entirely with ties to the community from decades before. His murder and Dallas’s subsequent investigation raise emotions and memories that have lain dormant for years, even as the souls of victims of two horrific crimes, long unsolved, cry out for justice.
Following the sudden death by poisoning of a flamboyant televangelist, the police department is thrown into a quandary: is a serial killer at work, or is a copycat using the St. Cristobal death to hide an entirely unrelated motive? Dallas has an unerring instinct for sorting out the wheat from the chaff, and soon she realizes that the solutions to both murders are intertwined in complex webs of deceit and greed.
SALVATION IN DEATH is perhaps Robb’s most challenging work to date as she continues to gently push cultural and technological boundaries --- all without making the future a strange or unnecessarily frightening place --- while demonstrating that murderers and those who would bring them to justice will always be among us. And while this installment is the latest in a long line of In Death novels, one can pick up the series at any point without fear of getting lost in the thicket of what has gone before. In fact, one of the highlights of SALVATION IN DEATH is the brief reappearance of a victim from a former case who bears an appreciative gift that is not only worth the price of the book alone but also assists Dallas in cracking one of her cases. It doesn’t get any better than this.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
