Innocent in Death

Overview

The phenomenal series set in a future New York City returns as NYPSD Lt. Eve Dallas hunts for the killer of a seemingly ordinary history teacher-and uncovers some extraordinary surprises. Craig Foster's death devastated his young wife, who'd sent him to work that day with a lovingly packed lunch. It shocked his colleagues at the private school, too, and as for the ten-year-old girls who found him in his classroom in a pool of bodily fluids-they may have been traumatized for life.

Eve soon determines that Foster's homemade lunch was tainted with deadly ricin, and that Mr. Foster's colleagues have some startling secrets of their own. It's Eve's job to sort it out- and discover why someone would have done this to a man who seemed so inoffensive, so pleasant . . . so innocent.

Now Magdalena Percell . . . there's someone Eve can picture as a murder victim. Possibly at Eve's own hands. The slinky blonde-an old flame of her billionaire husband, Roarke-has arrived in New York, and she's anything but innocent. Roarke seems blind to Magdalena's manipulation, and he insists that the occasional lunch or business meeting with her is nothing to worry about . . . and none of Eve's business. Eve's so unnerved by the situation that she finds it hard to focus on her case. Still, she'll have to put aside her feelings, for a while at least-because another man has just turned up dead.

Eve knows all too well that innocence can be a facade. Keeping that in mind may help her solve this case at last. But it may also tear apart her marriage.

Editorial Reviews

Once again Lt. Eve Dallas shows why she's "New York City's top murder cop" in Roberts's 24th thriller under her Robb pseudonym set half a century into the future (after 2006's Born in Death). Dallas tries to close a case at the exclusive Sarah Child Academy, where two bright 10-year-old girls discover the body of Craig Foster, a popular history teacher who proves to have been poisoned by ricin-laced cocoa. Dallas wonders if another staff member or a parent might be involved, but after the prime suspect, a promiscuous teacher who's been harassing another employee, turns up dead, the investigation takes a shocking turn. Besides a provocative puzzler, Robb provides an intense relationship update on Dallas and Roarke, her Irish power broker hubby, whose dark past--in the form of a crooked ex-girlfriend--returns to cause trouble. This prolific author, a recent Quills romance winner, is still at the top of her game. (Feb.) Copyright (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
-- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of J. D. Robb

In the spring of 1995, J. D. Robb's first book, Naked in Death, appeared on bookshelves with very little fanfare. Robb introduced readers to New York City in the near future, 2058 to be exact, as seen through the eyes of Eve Dallas, a detective with the New York City Police and Safety Department. The Gothic Journal hailed Robb's work as "a unique blend of hard-core police drama, science fiction and passionate romance" while The Paperback Forum called it "a fantastic new detective series." The popularity of that first book built up through the release of the subsequent Eve Dallas books, Glory In Death, Immortal In Death, Rapture In Death, Ceremony In Death, Vengeance in Death and Holiday In Death. Readers were taken with Eve Dallas's integrity, strength and heart and her burgeoning relationship with the mysterious Roarke. It's been a fairly open secret that J. D. Robb is the pseudonym of the more familiar New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts. But Ms. Roberts, and her publisher, Berkley, were content to let the Robb books build slowly with very little tie-in to the Nora Roberts's style of romantic suspense. The pragmatic reason for creating J.D. Robb was the astounding pace at which Nora Roberts produces books. With nearly 100 published books to her credit by 1995, she had built up a surplus of titles to be released by her publishers, Berkley and Silhouette, and still was creating more. Reluctant to publish romantic suspense books akin to what she was already writing under a pseudonym, Ms. Roberts was convinced that readers would enjoy romantic suspense with a difference. Thus J. D. Robb was born. The initials were taken from Ms. Roberts's sons, Jason and Dan, while Robb was a shortened form of Roberts. "I wanted to try something a little different. I love writing romance, and suspense, but also wanted a twist," explains Ms. Roberts. "The near future setting provided this, and allowed me to more or less create a world. What would it be like in 2058? I could decide. And I could illustrate my own feeling that while the toys may change, people remain basically the same. They still love and hate and covet, they still have courage and cowardice. They're still human." The In Death books have afforded Ms. Roberts an opportunity to explore a relationship beyond the ending of the first book. Her trilogies and family stories have been hugely popular with fans--the just-completed Chesapeake Bay trilogy, Sea Swept, Rising Tides and Inner Harbor have all spent time at the number one spot on The New York Times bestseller list--but when the story was over, she moved onto other characters. "One of the things I wanted to do was develop those characters over many books rather than tying it all up in one," she says. "I wanted to explore these people, and peel the layers off book by book. Eve and Roarke have given me the opportunity to explore a marriage as well. Each book resolved the particular crime or mystery that drives it, but the character development, the growth and the changes, the tone of the relationships go more slowly. I'm enjoying that tremendously." The experiment has succeeded beyond expectations. The eighth J. D. Robb book, Conspiracy in Death, was released in April 1999 as a lead title from Jove. Loyalty in Death followed in the fall, and Witness in Death was released in March 2000. This time, it's freely acknowledged that J. D. Robb and Nora Roberts are one and the same. An excerpt appeared at the end of Inner Harbor. And the Robb books will appear twice a year, much to the delight of Ms. Roberts' fans who are vocal in their demands for more of Eve Dallas and Roarke. And Nora Roberts--in any guise--will continue to delight that audience with her inimitable combination of romance and suspense in this century or the next.

Bio of Nora Roberts

Nora Roberts is the first writer to be inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame. The New York Times bestselling author of such novels as Sacred Sins and Divine Evil, she has become one of today's most successful and best-loved writers. Nora Roberts lives with her family in Maryland.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Penguin Group, Inc.

Filesize

936.16 KB

Number of Pages

385

eBook ISBN

9781429508742