Random in death

Sixteen-year-old Jenna Harbough is having the time of her life at a New York City club with her friends, enjoying a special night of music featuring her favorite band, Avenue A. Then someone bumps into her on the crowded dance floor, and Jenna feels a sharp jab in her arm. Several minutes later, Jenna is dead. Now, upon arriving at the crime scene, the first thing on NYPD Lieutenant Eve Dallas' to-do list is to determine if someone specifically targeted Jenna with a needle filled with a lethal cocktail of chemicals, or is this horrific crime just the first in what could become a series of random murders? With the fifty-eighth irresistibly readable entry in the ever-popular Eve Dallas series, Robb (Payback in Death, 2023) continues to showcase her mastery when it comes to creating inventive plots generously spiked with nail-biting suspense and populated with compelling characters, including Eve, who never stops working to bring justice to the victims in every murder case she investigates.

This sturdy entry in Robb's long-running procedural series featuring New York City police lieutenant Eve Dallas (after Payback in Death) again takes place in the recognizable future of the 2060s. This time around, Dallas and her team are on the hunt for a cunning killer who's targeting Manhattan teenagers. His first victim is nascent songwriter Jenna Harbough, who's injected with a cocktail of drugs at the trendy downtown Club Rock It and dies in the alley behind the venue. A short time later, another teenager dies under similar circumstances. Dallas is assigned to the cases and comes to the disturbing conclusion that the killer's victims were chosen at random. Interwoven throughout the murder investigation are long sections depicting Eve's idyllic marriage to the sexy, supportive, and ultrawealthy Roarke, including descriptions of the "castle he'd built in the heart of New York City" for the pair to inhabit. These envy-inducing segments can feel more frisky than the rote procedural beats, but Dallas's final confrontation with the killer has some heat. Series fans will get what they came for. (Jan.)

An alarmingly rapid series of random attacks on young women sends Lt. Eve Dallas and her NYPSD peeps into overdrive. Aspiring singer Jenna Harbough, who's followed the band Avenue A for years, has come to Club Rock It to hear them play and to pitch her own demo video to her idol, lead singer Jake Kincade. Instead, she dies in Kincade's arms after a stranger jabs her arm with a hypodermic needle filled with nasty toxins and flees during the time it takes the authorities to arrive. The perp, who's evidently planned his murderous assault carefully, has left so little evidence that the only thing Dallas is confident of is his gender. More evidence follows the very next night, but at a high cost: the death of Arlie Dillon, who turned out with her friends to hear the band Arrow. This time the friends can offer more clues about the killer, and Dr. Mira, the top NYPSD profiler, tells Eve he's clearly an incel, a teenage dork taking his revenge on the female sex for spurning his attentions and denying his masculinity. Linking the killer to an upscale pair of tasseled loafers helps Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, launch a search among New York's privileged, but it will take a third attack to provide the crucial evidence they need to narrow the pool of suspects down to one. In her latest installment, Robb goes easy on the background details and the updates on the private lives of Dallas and her circle to concentrate on sweating the details, and many readers absorbed in the story will forget that it takes place in the near future and not this week. Puts the "procedure" rewardingly back into the police procedural. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.