Naked in Death

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The world-building is smooth, with just enough details for the reader to coprehend what everything that's mentioned is but not enough to get fed up with info. Consequently, I found Roarke so difficult and so overpowering, I didn’t really get much of a sense of Eve as a character.

She also finds herself deeply attracted to one of the suspects, the hunky wealthy business man Roarke and must try to fight off his attentions. When he becomes a suspect in the murder case she is working on we find Eve in a bit of a predicament. Overall, I really enjoyed my first “In Death” book and will certainly be reading more - Hey, I want to upgrade to full "Roarke Groupie" status!I really wanted to like him, since his dialogue is the reason I've picked up the series in the first place. The same forces at work in the present world are involved, hiding their ugliness behind a squeaky clean facade.

This was a stunningly well written murder romance set just far enough into the future to give it a different feel. So I'm willing to be patient and won't complain about the lack of a lot of depth to the relationship and characters yet. The only lead is the last person to see the first victim alive: the aforementioned Roarke, who also owns the building she lived in, and who also has a collection of antique guns. Superstar Nora Roberts dons a new pseudonym and proves why she is one of the world's most remarkable storytellers in this ground-breaking novel of life and death in the 21st century.To be honest, I've gotten used to UF where you have plenty of fights and magic to make the book more interesting so I wasn't sure if a good old suspense would do the trick. I think that it helped that the underlying aspects were so dark that I didn't think the story would go there.

What follows is a fast paced, police procedural with further murders and red herrings to muddy the waters. It had everything, a kick-ass heroine with a bad past, a powerful, slightly shady and richer than Midas hero, a great mystery and a serial killer, all that set in a futuristic world which was surprisingly well thought and realistic for a book written 20 years ago when even cell phones were a rarity.

Naked in Death is a fast paced, gripping thriller full of mystery, suspense and crime with no holding back on the gory details and some twists in the tail so nothing is too predictable before it reaches a satisfying conclusion. Lieutenant Eve Dallas had been on the force for ten years and in that time had seen it all – or so she thought. He has a dubious past but seems to have put that behind him as his businesses flourish, and he has a noticeable code of honour. He enjoyed her reaction immensely, the flutter of the lashes, the faint flush, the darkening of the eyes -- a similar response, he noted, to a woman purring under a man's hands. I’d been postponing reading this series for a long time and I’m so glad I finally caved because it was right up my alley.

The complexity of Eve's character grew throughout the book as she grappled with the altercation she had just before the book started and her inability and disinterest to remember the first eight years of her life. I have been intending to start this series for such a long time and finally I did and boy what a start it was.Through Roarke’s steadiness and compassion, Eve begins to trust enough to let the long-denied past surface. The addition of just the right amount of romance adds to the story and the chemistry between Eve and Roarke was tangible. Abandoned as a young girl, with only flashbacks of a childhood she prefers not to face, she was renamed by social workers and lives for her work.