Shadows in death

This time it's personal. Up until now, professional hitman Lorcan Cobbe accepted contracts strictly for the money. But now he has another reason for traveling to New York City for his latest job: it is the home of his childhood nemesis, Roarke. Ever since they grew up on the streets of Dublin, Lorcan has nursed a personal grudge against Roarke, and now Lorcan has the perfect opportunity to eliminate him. But in order to achieve that goal, Lorcan must first deal with Roarke's wife: NYPD Lieutenant Eve Dallas. In the fifty-first thrilling addition to her Eve Dallas series, Robb (Golden in Death, 2020) sends her protagonists overseas as they pursue this internationally sought killer, skillfully deploying an engaging cast of characters headlined by a sexy-as-sin crime-fighting couple and creating vivid scenes in another adrenaline-fueled thriller that never loses its capacity to enthrall. HIGH DEMAND BACKSTORY: Readers can always count on Robb to deliver the goods, and a major, multiplatform marketing campaign will guarantee that Eve Dallas' many fans will be primed.

At the start of bestseller Robb's excellent 51st Eve Dallas novel set in mid-21st-century New York City (after Golden in Death), a call to a murder scene takes Eve, a New York Police and Security Department lieutenant, and her husband, Roarke, to Washington Square Park, where Galla Modesto, an heir to the Modesto Wine and Spirits company, has been stabbed to death. Amid the onlookers, Roarke spies Lorcan Cobbe, an assassin he recognizes from his time growing up in Dublin, and is convinced Cobbe is the killer. Cobbe, who flees the scene, hates Roarke, because Roarke's father refused to acknowledge Cobbe as his son. Roarke acts as a consultant to Eve and her team, who soon determine that Galla's jealous husband may have hired Cobbe to kill Galla because she was having an affair. The NYPSD officers work tirelessly to find Cobbe before he strikes again. The investigation takes a number of twists and turns before it reaches its explosive conclusion. Robb's many fans will be enthralled. 750,000 announced first printing. Agent: Amy Berkower, Writers House. (Sept.)

The savage gutting of a wine-and-spirits heiress in Washington Square Park brings Lt. Eve Dallas up against a baleful killer with both eyes firmly fixed on her husband and his family. Wine distributor Jorge Tween shows so little emotion over the death of Galla Modesto, the wife he obviously married for her family's money, that Eve and her partner, Detective Delia Peabody, instantly conclude that he's behind her death. Since his home-monitoring system gives him a cast-iron alibi, it would be clear that he hired a contractor even if Eve's husband, Roarke, hadn't recognized a balefully familiar figure first staring at him, then running from the crime scene. The hit man is Lorcan Cobbe, an enforcer for Roarke's late mobster father back in Dublin who's convinced that he's Patrick Roarke's illegitimate son and that the billions Roarke made before and after he walked away from crime to marry Eve ought to be his. "This is almost too easy," says Peabody, and she's absolutely right. Once Eve and Peabody, in the most predictably entertaining sequence of this installment, have extracted a confession from Tween, it's all Cobbe, all the time. Although the presumed killer has been a suspect or a person of interest in no less than 443 murders, his obsession with destroying Roarke and his relatives seems to lead him to act as incautiously and amateurishly as his client, and with a lot less excuse. Even the final sequence, in which Eve and Roarke take down the allegedly indestructible Cobbe, then turn him loose so that the two ancient antagonists can duke it out with bare fists, is comically anticlimactic. For readers who dream of hit men whose barks are worse than their bites. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.