lightreads | Entries tagged with au: jd robb

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.

Passions in Death

3/5. My preferred type of these, a good old-fashioned personal murder mystery. She puts queer people in her books now, and not entirely just as victims anymore, though there’s still that here. This is a pleasant procedural, made less interesting by the thing where Eve is the bestest detective ever who solves these cases on her gut hundreds of pages before the evidence lines up, and she is never wrong. Let the woman be wrong sometimes! Being wrong is interesting and a doorway into revealing character – why is she wrong? What are her biases (she has lots, and yet they never seem to get in the way)?

Random in Death

3/5. In Death does an incel. It’s a good procedural as this series goes, and she had the sense to keep the incel POV out until late in the game because blech, who wants to spend a lot of time in there. More importantly, though, I didn’t buy the portrayal of this guy. You could sell me a loner, sure, but zero contact with a broader – I don’t want to call it a “community” so let’s assign incels the collective noun creep -- creep? That is missing the point. This book would have you that this kid invented the mindset from scratch with no input, all while he recites thesis statements from your basic incel internet rantings. It makes the mystery less interesting to solve because you can’t get at him through his contacts, but it also makes the whole thing way less sociopolitically relevant, which is what she’s grasping after with all these Nora-Roberts-thinks-about-the-topic-of-the-day books in the first place.

Content notes: Uh, incel. Attempted rape. Murder of teenagers.

Payback in Death

3/5. In Death Book number whatever. The kind I like – a more intimate murder mystery – marred by Nora Roberts finally realizing she is writing coppaganda and that it may not land well with people. Her solution? Leaning really hard into the ‘few bad apples’ theory of policing. What else is she supposed to do, I suppose. So, you know. That’s how that’s going.

Nightwork

3/5. He is a self-taught international jewel thief who meets the love of his life in Shakespeare seminar, then quickly abandons her when his past comes calling. They meet again a decade later when he is taking a sabbatical as a high school English/drama teacher and she is writing a book, like you do?

I keep wondering why these Nora Roberts standalone modern romances are so compelling. It’s not the romances, we’ve established that. Those are always too heteronormative for me (not all het romances are, but hers…yeah). And it’s not the plots, those are window dressing and she knows it. So WTF is it? I think it’s that she gives good life writing. You know, here’s 50 pages in which someone lives a decade, with just the right amount of specificity and the right amount of blur. And I think, specifically, that she writes life studies rather than character studies. How they turn, how they change, where the road goes, where it doesn’t. All of that illuminates character, but that’s a result, not a cause. It’s not the sort of thing I would say I like, but she is damn good at it. I suppose she better be, at this point.

Content notes: Death of a parent to cancer, threats of violence, thieving made sexy.

Desperation in Death

3/5. Yet another big international evil organization book, in this case sex trafficking. Interesting to me not for that – these are my least favorite subtype In Death book, they make no god damn sense. But this one is about how much things have changed for Eve, how much she has integrated her trauma, to be able to work the case the way she does. It’s a bit of a victory lap, tbh. Fair.

Content notes: Captivity, grooming, sex trafficking

Encore in Death

3/5. A return to the twisty, personal, complicated murders. It’s kind of about the compromises you make in marriage – for love, specifically – and the sacrifices you don’t. But that part doesn’t have any real teeth as it is not really reflecting on Eve and Roarke. Also, the timeline of this series continues to be absolutely boggling – she’s been writing these for a quarter century, and they’ve only covered what, barely three years of story time? In sixty books? ~~Nora Roberts~~ These people really are workaholics.

Content notes: Murder

Abandoned in Death

3/5. A solid procedural entry with a lot of complicated backstory about child abandonment and amnesia and reinventing a self from scratch that was absorbing to read, but that tangles up badly in the end. This book is confused and conflicted about fault, and who can be blamed for the inception of violence. It's fine to be conflicted about that, but Roberts doesn't want to be, she wants her usual black-and-white view of fault. So she writes this ambiguous, tricky story of a parent abandoning a child through some fault and some horrible circumstance, and draws the obvious parallels to Eve and Roarke, both abandoned by their parents in different and terrible ways. And she could have let that breathe, and sit with everything else the series has done on the theme of hurt children constructing themselves into whole adults capable of love and happiness. But nope. She had to simplify it, had to say oh, well, this five-year-old child subjected to a horrible trauma, he was already a baby sociopath before that (what?), so – she doesn't actually have an end to that explanation, it's just really important that she cut through the knot to absolve and assign blame.

It all made me think, wincingly, about how mad Eve gets whenever she catches a killer who is actually mentally ill. Like it makes her furious whenever anyone suggests that maybe someone should be in a psych facility instead of one of these famed off-planet prisons. And Eve can always tell at a glance, you see, being an expert or something. A symptom of the same pathology – the overpowering need to center the fault for violence entirely within the person committing it, as if violence just springs out of no context.

Content notes: Child abandonment, captivity, murder.

Tribute

3/5. Classic Nora about the granddaughter of a famous Hollywood star returning to the country house her grandmother supposedly committed suicide in to restore it from the inside out, except someone doesn't want her digging into the house's secrets. Lots of home design and decorating talk, with that usual thing where the making of the home is a metaphor for the making of the self. Published exactly when you think it is for a book that really wants to sell you on how great it is to be a house flipper. Major bonus points for the heroine explicitly being super hot because she's good with power tools and the hero – who decidedly is not – being way into it. Minus points for the hero being a classic Nora Roberts boundary violator (he watches her through binoculars for two hours! For "work"! Christ.)

Content notes: Violence, bad parenting.

Forgotten in Death

3/5. The new In Death book. A nice pair of mysteries which managed to be interesting even when the solutions were apparent early on. I do wonder how much editing she really gets these days. These books combine an excellent attention to detail on the scene-by-scene basis, which makes sense as their chief pleasure is watching the protagonist interact with a vast colorful river of people. But there are also slip-ups that editorial really should catch, like changing someone from mixed race to white. Anyway, a solid entry, though I will keep saying it and keep saying it and keep saying it: introducing diversity into your books counts for exactly zero when that diversity is in the form of the victims of murder.

Content notes: Racism, murder, including of a pregnant woman.

Legacy

4/5. A standalone new release from earlier this year about the daughter of a fitness guru growing up and surviving the violence of her father the one time she meets him, and the legacy of that in her family and his. I liked this one. It has a deep well of coziness and homemaking and community creating, like a lot of her books do (and yes, of course there is interior decorating). Our heroine comes home to a tiny town where she has deep roots, and sets those roots even deeper. And yeah there's a suspense plot about a threat to her, but honestly whatever, those passages are just misogynist villain POV, not worth the time.

This book did make me realize that a core part of the Nora Roberts fantasy is a conviction that passion for a thing = success at a thing = great monetary reward, QED. I mean, I guess this is a thing you would believe in your bones if you are Nora Roberts. But most of these people are remarkably successful at the sorts of niche and creative careers where a teeny tiny fraction of people do extraordinarily well and a slightly bigger fraction make a living, and pretty much everyone else has to do something else. E.g., in this book, owning an indie comics company or writing musical hits. It's a nice fantasy, I suppose, if you believe that capitalism is here to reward the virtuous, but I can't really take it seriously.

Content notes: Death of a spouse and of parents/grandparents, violence, misogyny, fatphobia really in the water in this one.

Shelter in Place

3/5. The survivors of a mass shooting carry on with their intersecting lives. Years later, one is a cop and another an artist (successful and well-paid, naturally!) and they find each other as another threat approaches. Less cozy than Legacy, but with another take on finding community, this time on a tiny island off the coast of Maine. Plus there's a stray dog. Classic.

Content notes: Villain POV complete with homophobia and antisemitism and lots of violence. Mass shooting.

The Liar

4/5. Upon her husband's death in a boating accident, young mother discovers he was lying about a lot of things, and he's left her with a mountain of debt and a lot of questions. His drama follows her back to her home town, where she's beginning a tentative romance with a local contractor.

From the beginning of Roberts's Home Renovation Period (it's like a Blue Period but with more furniture shopping). I liked this one – the heroine embeds herself back into four generations of family, and there's an emphasis on female friendship (well, except for the requisite mean girl). The romance is, as usual, fine but forgettable. Don't read Nora Roberts for sweeping romance. Read for multiple generations of women being awesome and finding their way through early motherhood and hard times.

Content notes: References to violence, emotional abuse.

Faithless in Death

3/5. My least favorite type of mystery in this series, i.e. the unraveling of a vast international conspiracy as opposed to the solving of an intimate, personal crime. Also, she wrote this one when she was really mad about social justice – this book is really mad about using religion to excuse violence, and everyone's gotta speechify about how homophobia is bad, which, like. I appreciate it, Nora? But maybe try writing a book that contains queer people who are not (a) murdered or (b) evil? Like, just once?

Content notes: Trafficking, domestic violence, rape, forced impregnation, family separation.

Shadows in Death

3/5. She's just going to keep elaborating everyone's backstories for all of time to pull villains from empty air, eh? I'm okay with it. Less okay with the end of this book, which is a straight up exercise of police brutality which we are supposed to believe is character growth.

Content notes: Animal harm. Poor kitty.

Hideaway

3/5. Daughter of Hollywood royalty gets kidnapped as a child, rescues herself, and lives with the various and propagating consequences for many years. I should say for honesty's sake, though, that this will always in my mind be the book with sexy cow milking. Yes, really.

Roberts in my favorite mode, which I've been calling "romance in context." That is, a story that takes the heroine through several decades of life, in the rich context of her family and friends, to show how her eventual long-term romance isn't so much a destination but another turn in the road. And one that makes sense, given what has come before. This book also has some of her usual childhood trauma and suspense stuff, but she's honestly not very committed to it here and wraps that part of it up with a vague gesture. She's right, it's not the point.

Content notes: Child endangerment, child harm, bad parenting, one offscreen incident of racist violence.

Under Currents

3/5. Lawyer/landscaper romance in the small town where one grew up and one has fled. Phew, I had to skip big chunks of the first quarter of this one (child abuse, a lot of it) and this book in general is very . . . well, it's about a sweet, emotionally slow-burn romance complete with a cute dog and plucky teenagers, except around the edges there are multiple utterly depraved or hateful human beings ready to terrorize and murder. I realize that's the genre, but *shakes head* there's something off with this one. Too much brutality porn.

Content notes: Child abuse, gaslighting, spousal abuse, misogyny.

Golden in Death

3/5. My last 2019 book.* Fiftieth mystery, not entirely the same as the first. This one touches on the destruction of families, leaving the protagonist to marvel at the strength and safety of hers. It's a nice beat to take so deep into this series which has moved a lot of people over a great deal of emotional territory.

*Technically not to be released until February 2020 but you know, things happen.

Vendetta in Death

3/5. Because Nora Roberts is like that, a new book came out as soon as I finished all the existing ones. Kind of a retread plot wise – this one is about a woman getting revenge on various awful men through violence. This series has never been, shall we say, entirely clear on its views of when revenge killing is okay. The series thinks it isn't cool with it, but actually is depending on who does it. Anyway, what I wanted to say is that this book is about how the main character is okay. How far she has come in her community and her marriage. How she can count on people, knows how, and knows who. That she has amazing women around her, and men worthy of her trust. It's nice, and a surprising amount of development for a series that really liked to roll around in the trauma at various points.

…Yes, still.

In Death

3/5. Nora Roberts writes future romantic suspense novels about a NYC cop with a tragic past who solves crime with the aid of her billionaire computer genius husband, like you do.

But wait, you may be starting to ask. Surely you aren't talking about this entire series, right? Doesn't it have, like, fifty novels in it by now? Surely….?

Listen.

…Listen.

It's forty nine novels, okay.

…And nine novellas.

Here's what happened. There I was, seven months into an increasingly complicated pregnancy*, and I cleverly thought hey, you know, I'm going to want something to read just before and after delivering. Something where I'm low-grade invested and can just flip to the next book without any real emotional labor. The book series equivalent of a five million word fanfic. So I grabbed a few of these books, prompted by the ladies of the Worst Best Sellers podcast, and figured I'd try them out and cue up more when the time came. (I'd read a few of these some years ago, but I was far less fluent in romance then and suspected they may hit the spot now)

…

And now my due date is in four days and I've read 49 novels and 9 novellas. My plan has entirely failed. Or was entirely successful?

Anyway. These books. They're about a tough lady cop who is basically half feral at the beginning, and who accidentally builds a vibrant community of friends and colleagues around herself, and who occasionally notices this to her frustrated bafflement. She's basically like who the fuck decided to like all these people? Ugh. I kinda dig her.

These books are also about two very intense, traumatized people who fall in love fast, before they even fall in like, in some ways. And how they fling themselves into marriage, then have to do a lot of hard work to figure it out. I'm not the most widely-read romance reader, but I can't think of another example of a series which gives so much time to developing an established relationship, which is totally my jam but which is not the jam of the industry, generally.

There are a lot of ridic things about these books – the billionaire thing, and the way she orgasms if he so much as breathes on her. And that frustrating thing where a writer is sort of coy about sex – lots of metaphors and talking around body parts – which contrasts sharply with the florid, explicit passages about violence. Oh, and I have to warn for one of the secondary relationships, which is supposed to be fun but which is basically just workplace sexual harassment and self-directed fat-shaming.

However, you gotta respect Nora Roberts. Not just for putting out books like a freaking machine, but for co-writing a book with herself. For real – one of the books in this series is half traditional modern romance by Nora Roberts, and half romantic suspense set fifty years later by J.D. Robb. Like, you keep on living your best life, Nora.

Anyway. Someone could write a substantial paper on the visions of the future contained in this series. She started it in the 90's when the 2060's were much farther away; her vision of the future is partly hopeful (salaries for stay at home parents, gun ban, legalized and regulated sex work) and part grim (violence never changes, and sexism doesn't really either). There's something thin about the scifi elements here – they have that shiny foil wrapping quality – but there's a surprising amount to think about.

Look, it's been a hard few months. And I'm about to push this baby out and I am out of books.

Content notes: Graphic recollections of rape, depictions of murder of all sorts, violence, etc.

*Baby is fine. I am the object of much dubiousness.