What’s it all about?:
THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING SERIES . . . The chilling new suspense novel from the author of Brotherhood in Death.
After a party in New York, Lieutenant Eve Dallas rides home with her billionaire husband, Roarke, happy to be done with cocktails and small talk.
After another party, not far away, a woman retires to her bedroom with her husband—and walks into a brutal nightmare.
Their paths are about to collide…
When the young woman—dazed, naked, and bloody—wanders in front of their car, Roarke slams on the brakes just in time, and Eve, still in glittering gown and heels, springs into action. It’s been a long night for the tired homicide cop, and it’s far from over.
Daphne Strazza is rushed to the ER, but it’s too late for Dr. Anthony Strazza. A brilliant orthopedic surgeon, he now lies dead amid the wreckage of his obsessively organized town house, his three safes opened and emptied. Daphne would be a valuable witness, but in her terror and shock the only description of the perp she can offer is repeatedly calling him “the devil” . . .
While it emerges that Dr. Strazza was cold, controlling, and widely disliked—and that he treated Daphne like a trophy wife—this is one case where the evidence doesn’t point to the spouse as the first suspect. So Eve and her team must get started on the legwork, interviewing everyone from dinner-party guests to professional colleagues to caterers, in a desperate race to answer some crucial questions:
What does the devil look like? And where will he show up next?
What did I think?:
First of all, many thanks to Little, Brown publishers for inviting me to take part in this blog tour and providing me with a copy of Echoes In Death in exchange for an honest review. Now, I love my crime fiction but so far haven’t actually read any of J.D. Robb’s novels – and there’s been a lot of them. This is the forty-fourth in the In Death series featuring Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her Irish husband Roarke and the author has written many more novels (more than two hundred to be exact!) under both the pseudonym J.D. Robb and her real name, Nora Roberts.
The novel follows our main character Lt Eve Dallas, her husband to a lesser extent, and her loyal partner Peabody as they deal with a frightening new evil. On their way home from a party, a naked, bloody and petrified young woman jumps out in front of Eve and Roarke’s car. After further questioning the woman, Daphne Strazza is found to have undergone a horrifying ordeal. A man has broken into her house, brutally raped and beaten her multiple times and killed her husband. The only thing she can tell Eve for certain is that he was “the devil.” Eve soon discovers that the assailant was wearing a mask and shortly forms a connection between two other incidents involving rich couples where the perp dressed up as a vampire and secondly as a ghoul. However, the previous two incidents didn’t involve any deaths and Eve worries that the incidents are escalating. Eve and her department must pull out all the stops to find the man responsible for these atrocities before he strikes again.
Echoes In Death isn’t like any other work of crime fiction that I’ve read before and I loved that about it. It’s actually set in the future, a mid 21st-century New York City where the landscape still feels quite familiar but technology has moved on in giant leaps and bounds. We have intricate home security systems in place, machines that can identify a living person or corpse at the touch of a button, new drugs and treatments for things as simple as a headache and (my favourite) helpful household droids. There are a multitude of strong, interesting characters including the independent, compassionate Eve and her side-kick Peabody whom I instantly fell in love with. My only slight issue was that I guessed who the killer was pretty soon after he was introduced in the novel. I usually feel quite disappointed when this happens but I have to say that it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the story at all.
I have to admit to being a bit concerned when I agreed to read this novel as I’m a bit of a stickler at reading things in order and not having read any of the other books in the series I was worried that I wouldn’t connect to certain things in the characters back stories. It’s true at points I did feel slightly ignorant, especially concerning Eve’s traumatic past (which I won’t go into for fear of spoilers) but in a positive way, I am looking forward to having lots of books in the series to go back to and fill in the blanks for myself! This book surprised me in a lot of ways, it certainly wasn’t what I expected and I’m really looking forward to catching up with things right from the beginning of the series.
Would I recommend it?:
But of course!
Star rating (out of 5):
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Nora Roberts is the number one New York Times bestseller of more than 200 novels. She published her first novel using the pseudonym J.D. Robb in 1995, with the In Death series, Robb has become one of the biggest thriller writers on earth, with each new novel reaching number one on bestseller charts over the world. With over 450 million copies of her books in print, she is indisputably one of the most celebrated and popular writers in the world.
Find Nora on her website at http://www.noraroberts.com/
Or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/norarobertsjdrobb
Thank you once again to Little, Brown publishers for inviting me to take part in this blog tour, I’ve had a great time doing it. Echoes In Death was published on 7th February 2017 and is also available as an e-book. Why not check out some of the other stops on the tour?
