Secrets in Death (In Death Series #45)

by J. D. Robb Narrated by Susan Ericksen

Overview

A new novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling series: Lt. Eve Dallas must separate rumors from reality when a woman who traffics in other people's secrets is silenced.

The chic Manhattan nightspot Du Vin is not the kind of place Eve Dallas would usually patronize, and it's not the kind of bar where a lot of blood gets spilled. But that's exactly what happens one cold February evening.

The mortally wounded woman is Larinda Mars, a self-described "social information reporter," or as most people would call it, a professional gossip. As it turns out, she was keeping the most shocking stories quiet, for profitable use in her side business as a blackmailer. Setting her sights on rich, prominent marks, she'd find out what they most wanted to keep hidden and then bleed them dry. Now someone's done the same to her, literallyamp;mdash;with a knife to the brachial artery.

Eve didn't like Larinda Mars. But she likes murder even less. To find justice for this victim, she'll have to plunge into the dirty little secrets of all the people Larinda Mars victimized herself. But along the way, she may be exposed to some information she really didn't want to know¿

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

07/03/2017
At the start of bestseller Robb’s entertaining 45th novel set in a near-future New York City (after Echoes in Death), homicide cop Eve Dallas is having a drink at Du Vin, a lower Manhattan bar owned by her entrepreneur husband, Roarke, when gossip reporter Larinda Mars staggers in her direction. Eve catches the woman, whose right sleeve is soaked in blood, as she collapses, but despite almost immediate medical help, Mars dies. The subsequent police interviews with staff and patrons reveal only that the killer, probably male, exited the bar right after slicing Mars’s brachial artery. Eve soon discovers that Mars was heavily into blackmail; the list of potential suspects includes everyone from Mets star third baseman Wylee Stamford to talk show queen Annie Knight. Robb fleshes out the main action with such tantalizing puzzles as the reason for Mars’s extensive plastic surgery and the location of the hidey-hole she must have kept. Robb continues to impress with her ability to make the same murder mystery formula fresh. 750,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Amy Berkower, Writers House. (Sept.)

Library Journal

04/01/2017
Gossip reporter Larinda Mars has been murdered at a way-too-cool Manhattan nightspot called Du Vin, and Lt. Eve Dallas is dismayed to learn that her dislikable victim kept her worse secrets from her column, instead using them for blackmail. The latest in Robb's "In Death" series, optioned for TV; with a national laydown on September 5.

Kirkus Reviews

2017-06-20
Lt. Eve Dallas (Echoes in Death, 2017, etc.) investigates the murder of a gossip columnist whose death answers a thousand prayers.Eve's already-fraught meeting with irritating forensic anthropologist Dr. Garnet DeWinter at the fashionable watering hole Du Vin turns abruptly worse when a woman staggers out of the ladies' room and bleeds out under her eyes. The victim, self-styled social information reporter Larinda Mars, had dirt on just about everyone who mattered—including, as it awkwardly turns out, the owner of Du Vin, who just happens to be Roarke, Eve's billionaire husband—and wasn't shy about digging under every rock and paying off or blackmailing possible informants for more. So although several witnesses and the security cameras so ubiquitous in 2061 swiftly identify a likely suspect, it's impossible to distinguish that well-muffled figure from dozens of other wannabe Mars-slayers. Following their noses, Eve and her partner, Detective Amelia Peabody, focus on three of Larinda's marks: talk screen queen Annie Knight, baseball star Wylee Stamford, and teenage actress Missy Lee Durante. Larinda was indeed blackmailing them all over secrets worth killing to preserve, sparking the moral outrage Eve's never shy about revealing on behalf of blackmail victims "mostly trying to protect loved ones as much, maybe more, than themselves." But the nominal victim's insatiably feral nature makes it hard to work up an equal level of outrage over her murder or to feel much of a sense of closure when Eve plucks the perp from a crowded field of suspects who would all have been perfectly within their rights in shutting down the blackmail factory by fair means or foul. The 45th entry in this fleet, easy-reading series provides a dramatic opening scene, a second act guaranteed to raise your most self-righteous hackles, and a denouement even Robb must have recognized as an anticlimax.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169940244
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Series:	In Death (Eve Dallas) Series
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	826,235

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