Fantasy in Death

December 21, 2009
Lt. Eve Dallas, a top homicide cop for the New York Police and Security Department (the law enforcement agency for a mid 21st-century New York City), faces one of the more challenging cases of her career in bestseller Robb's exciting 31st “in death” novel (after Kindred in Death
). When someone cuts off the head of Bart Minnock, the genius founder of the computer gaming company U-Play, apparently while he was role-playing against an imaginary opponent in a prototype of a fantasy adventure that could rock the industry, Eve investigates. Security logs show no one entered Minnock's building around the time of his murder, presenting a futuristic variation on the classic locked-room mystery. Aided by her husband, Roarke, who was a potential business rival of the victim, Dallas focuses on who would benefit from Minnock's death. Robb is the pseudonym of romantic suspense author Nora Roberts.

January 1, 2010
Even though Fantastical was still in the testing phase, Bart Minnock was certain the virtual-reality game would murder the competition. Instead, Bart is the one found dead. Now Lieutenant Eve Dallas has to come up with a plausible theory as to how someone could bypass the foolproof security in the millionaires holo-room and decapitate him. The fact that the popular gaming guru doesnt seem to have any enemies isnt making Eves job any easier, but the more time Eve spends investigating the case, the more evidence she finds that several people may have had a reason for wanting Bart out of the way. Now, with a little hands-on training from her husband, Roarke, a computer-gaming expert, Eve sets out to write a program for catching a clever killer. In the thirtieth addition to her best-selling Eve Dallas series, Robb successfully mixes a classic locked-room murder with plenty of cutting-edge twenty-first-century technology, and the end result is an ingenious tale of crime that delivers plenty of Robbs patented dangerous chills and passionate thrills(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)