J.D. Robb’s Memory in Death is a welcome return to the personally-based mystery after the appalling conspiracy mode of Origin. Eve Dallas’ former foster mother shows up, shakes Eve badly by causing Eve to remember her time in foster care, tries to blackmail Roarke, and ends up dead. Eve, of course, discovers the body and investigates the case.
My only complaint about this installment in the series is that it undercuts its own suspense, quite bafflingly. Early on, there’s a snippet of the foster-mother’s point of view, which makes clear something that Eve spends the next fifty pages (or so; the book’s gone back to the library) trying to figure out—which she does, indisputably. As far as I can tell, the only effect of this dip into the foster-mother’s point of view is to remove a bit of the mystery, which seems suboptimal for a book shelved in the mystery section of the bookstore. I also think it contributed to my guessing whodunnit quite early, though I probably would have regardless.
The fun character work makes up for this, to me, but it does strike me as a bit sloppy. Then again, this is a guilty-pleasure series for me.
Thank you for your piece on Memory In Death. I’ve been reading this series for a while now (oddly, I discovered it via the SF Book Club) and completely forgot it was released in January! It’s been sitting in my Amazon cart for a while now.
I’m with you about why I read this – it’s in the guilty pleasures category along with Janet Evanovitch and *gulp* Anne McCaffery’s Pern series.
I think they’re usually released in February–I know I was surprised to see it out this early.
Apparently the next (_Born in Death_) won’t be out until November, though there will be a novella in an anthology called _Bump In The Night_ out this spring.