The Sunday Times bestselling series is back with a gripping new thriller that pits homicide detective Eve Dallas against a conspiracy of exploitation and evil…

Mina Rose Cabot, age thirteen, disappeared walking home from soccer practice in Devon, Pennsylvania.

Eight months later her body is found in Battery Park, New York, speared through the chest by a three-inch piece of wood.

Lt. Eve Dallas knows that whoever took Mina is responsible for her death. But who took her and where has Mina been for eight long months…?

I received a review copy from the publishers via Netgalley

This is novel fifty five in the Eve Dallas series – there have been short stories and novellas along the way too. I have missed two along the way (they are on a bookshelf in my house waiting for me to get to them). It is safe to say I am a fan of J.D. Robb and I always look forward to each new Eve Dallas novel.

For those not in the know, reading the first fifty four novels are not essential to enjoying this book. After the introduction of the character back in Naked in Death you can pretty much read the books any old way you like. Down the years characters have been introduced, coupled up, had babies, lost loved ones and grown as their backstories get developed. After fifty plus stories the respective backstories are so well developed that the cast of these books feel like old friends to me. I miss them when I am not reading about them.

The books have delighted (mainly) down the years but, as you may expect, some just didn’t quite land for me. Dallas is a murder cop in New York and the stories are set in the future – somewhere around the year 2060. This may put off some readers but this series delivers terrific murder tales with each new book and I love watching Dallas and her team closing in on the bad guys. After so many years of reading I have decided some stories deliver more on developing the characters and throwing big pivotal events into their timeline (with a crime in the background) whereas most books give a solid murder story to enjoy while the characters mainly work their personal lives around the latest investigation. Desperation in Death is very much a story about the crime and not a tale to shake up the characters. That said, this is one of the biggest and most harrowing adventures which Dallas and friends have had to face for quite some time.

The blurb teases the story up really nicely. A young girl is heading home and vanishes. She turns up eight months later – a large piece of wood is sticking out of her chest and she is quite dead. But the girl has only just died, she is well fed, shows evidence of having expensive hair and nail treatments and is wearing expensive clothing. Where has she been for those eight months and why has nobody seen her?

As Eve begins to look into the murder of the young girl she discovers there may have been a second girl in the area at the same time. The reader knows who the second girl was and how both came to be together at a crime scene (which one of them never left). They also know the trauma both girls have endured prior to Eve entering their lives. It’s a compelling build up and once Eve and her colleagues start to piece together the connections between the two girls we are all on a fast paced race-against-time thriller.

The stakes are higher than we have seen for some time and if there is any hope to save dozens of vulnerable children then everything the NYPD do must be done quickly, quietly and there is no room for error. I was hooked.

I knew before I picked up Desperation in Death that I would enjoy the story – I wasn’t prepared for how engrossed I would become in this particular story. Chapters flew by and I finished the whole book in a single day. I love these stories and I’m already waiting for the next one.

Desperation in Death is published by Piatkus and is available in Hardback, Digital and Audiobook format. You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09Z1R3F7T/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0