A Woman of Mystery

This is book 24 in the Eve Dallas series by J.D. Robb (a pseudonym for Nora Roberts). These books are futuristic police mysteries; they are very light and rather formulaic, your basic literary junk food. Eve is a NYPD cop in 2150 or thereabouts; she’s married to the richest man in the world. (This is a facet of almost every Nora Roberts book I’ve ever read, and I’ve probably read almost 100 of her books. It’s not always the fella who’s rich, and they aren’t always billionaires like Roarke, but the intended couple will always end up upper-middle class at the lowest!) These books also fall into the traditional romance novel trap of the man always being just a bit more together than the woman – just enough to save the princess, as it were.

Still, as I’ve disclosed, I’ve read a lot of Roberts’s books and I continue to read them, just as I continue to have a Twix bar every once in a while. The character of Eve Dallas is stimulating. She was a terrifically abused child who became a homicide cop; she is a major control freak and she hates emotional scenes. Still, she is also sensitive and loving and committed to her work and her friends, and the struggle between the aspects of who she is frequently takes center stage. I like her quite a bit, and enjoy seeing the blend of power and vulnerability that is in all of us.

This particular volume dealt with the murder of an innocuous schoolteacher, for which no satisfying motive could be found.  It became obvious to me fairly early who the murderer was, not from any clues in the plot itself but from the nature of the character; the ability of such a character to commit a murder meant a large deviation from normal psychology and that deviation was quite apparent in the behavior and dialogue.  I don’t generally read a mystery with the intent of figuring the solution before it is revealed, so it didn’t bother me to know, any more than it bothers me not to know.

I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this book or this series except to a reader looking for a very particular type of literary experience.  The futuristic cop mystery is heavily saturated with Nora Roberts’s experience as a romance novelist.  (In other words, there are the requisite scenes of passion, complete with “throbbing members” and so forth, as well as the relationship dynamics I described above.)  The plots are solidly devised, but also deviced – they follow a predictable formula – although the information revealing the killer isn’t always so awkwardly developed as in this particular book.  If your preference is for a junk food book, you may just enjoy this one, though.