Saturday, September 16, 2017

Review: Rapture in Death by J.D. Robb

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Title: Rapture in Death
Series: In Death
Author: J.D. Robb
Read copy: eBook (Kindle)
Published: March 3, 2007
Publisher: Berkley
ASIN: B000OIZTAO

They died with smiles on their faces. Three apparent suicides: a brilliant engineer, an infamous lawyer, and a controversial politician. Three strangers with nothing in common—and no obvious reasons for killing themselves. Lieutenant Eve Dallas found the deaths suspicious. And her instincts paid off when autopsies revealed small burns on the brains of the victims.

Was it a genetic abnormality or a high-tech method of murder? Eve's investigation turned to the provocative world of virtual-reality games—where the same techniques used to create joy and desire could also prompt the mind to become the weapon of its own destruction...

My rating:

During the last hours of Eve and Roarke's honeymoon, a young engineer decides to commit suicide in the almost finished resort the couple is visiting. The strange thing is, the young man hung himself, but died with a smile on his face.

Back in New York, everything goes back to normal with Eve performing her duties as a cop, including attending court and battling with a particularly slimy defense attorney. A defense attorney that slashes his own wrist the next night and dies with a smile on his face.

One might be a fluke, two a coincidence, three (thanks to a basejumping without a parachute senator) is a pattern. A pattern that points toward homicide no matter the fact it all looks like suicide.



This was, IMO, the weakest of the first four books in the series. It started rather slow, dragging its feet, picking up pace only somewhere in the middle of ti all, only to slow once more and rush to the finish in those last few pages.

One of the problems for me was the lack of romance between Eve and Roarke. What there was of it seemed lackluster compared to the previous books. Sure, they’re a married couple now, but that doesn’t mean romance is dead, now, does it?

The second problem was the predictability of the entire book. Some reviewers were a bit shocked by the “closet scene” between our intrepid couple, and I don’t know why. Everything pointed to it happening (maybe not in a closet, but happening nonetheless). But it was done well, if you ask me, providing just enough tension to keep the story flowing, while also providing quite a red herring, though I wasn’t deterred.

The third problem was that I knew who the real killer was from the first scene (nothing beats a female intuition, I guess), and that also added to the whole predictability of the plot.

It wasn't as fast-paced as I've come to expect, the interactions between some of the characters were rather lukewarm (even the friendship between Mavis and Eve), the main villain was predictable, and the killer's motive rather "overdone" in the God complex department. I need a solid reason to believe a murderous plot, and this story didn't deliver on that.

Quite a disappointment, really.

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