Bonded in Death by JD Robb

[lightreads]

Bonded in Death

3/5. Latest of these – if you don’t know what they are by now, I can’t help you. An okay series entry that, as usual recently, took the safe and boring route. Eve is a half step ahead of the killer through the whole book, and the safety of everyone you care about is pretty much a sure thing. Some unsubtle but nice reflections on the ways groups of people bond in adversity, or in hard collective work, both Eve’s police team and extended network and the team of old spies at the heart of the story.

I was more interested in the history dropped here than the case. I’ve always wondered what these “urban wars” were about. The explanation we get here is plausible in parts – a mass movement to ‘burn it all down’ – and very silly in the whole – a worldwide(?) coordinated(?) breakdown of order in urban centers? Which is resolved after years of fighting without apparently really changing the geopolitics of anything? Okay, Nora, carry on.

Content notes: Murder, child abduction/harm.

Comments

[aella_irene]

I really felt the lack of actual jeopardy, and actual crime solving, in this one. They knew who it was from very early on, and there was never any...mystery. I kept thinking that surely, it would turn out that the traitor had been framed, and it was someone else. But no.

Also, and this is very petty she titles Dames wrong. British Dames are Dame Forename not Dame Surname. She did it in Witness in Death and I was sure someone would have corrected her by now, but no...

[lightreads]

Yeah, and I could have forgiven the lack of, you know, actual mystery if the book was doing other stuff, like with Eve's sweet/cranky relationship with the butler whose name has just completely fallen out of my head, how? But it didn't do much of that, really.

From what I've seen, she takes corrections extremely poorly these days. I watched her totally lose it at some very mild 'hmm this characterization didn't ring true to me' crit from a fan who read one of the prior books on release day, so clearly someone invested. And she went all 'they're my characters, you have no right' etc. etc. on them. Yikes. Kinda makes you wonder if any crit or correction is at all acceptable, or if her team knows better than to even try.