When Dallas is called in because the body of a thirteen-year-old is found impaled with a splintered stake, Eve has questions. Some things just don't add up. Why was the beautifully groomed child left in the park? Why does the blood on her clothes lead to another thirteen-year-old who's missing?

As Eve searches for the missing child and begins to discover facts that lead her to believe that someone is kidnapping and grooming children for the sex trade. Naturally, this brings back horrible memories from Eve's own childhood. But she has Mira and Roarke to support her as she investigates.

This was very much a police procedural as Eve and her team, with Roarke's techy help, gradually find information and put it together getting closer and closer to the villains. Woven in among all the police procedural elements are the strong emotions that Eve goes through as she sees so many parallels with her own past.

This was an excellent, fast-paced story filled with great characters. ( )

Easy breezy, good guys winning, what a nice break from some heavy stories. ( )

Another engaging installment, with a better mystery than the last few entries. However, the story has very dark themes of child trafficking. I would like to see Robb completely move past Eve's childhood trauma as a main driver of angst for Roarke & Eve. ( )

Review to come

Eve is working the case of a young girl found dead in the park. She had been missing for months but the clues at the site peg her being kidnapped for months and not a runaway. With DNA found on her that matches a young runaway, the crime scene was set to peg the runaway as the murderer, but Eve knows better and quickly Eve and Peabody know they are dealing with a child sex ring. The case is hard on Eve, and she is hard on everyone around her and even madder when the people closest to her try to ease any of the burden on her. The good guys win in the end and there is some nice comeuppance to at least one of the villains in the book.

Digital review copy provided by the publisher through Edelweiss.
( )

It's 2061, and there are young girls trapped in a hellish "Academy" in New York City, where they are being trained to be slaves--some of them, sex slaves. Among them are Mina, a beautiful girl with white skin and red hair, and Dorian, an equally beautiful mixed-race girl with darker, clear, perfect skin, and sharper features. They become allies in an attempt to get out--which is almost successful. Almost. Soon Mina is dead, and Dorian is injured, in hiding, and has a very hazy memory of what happened. When Mina's body is found, Lt. Eve Dallas catches the case, and soon realizes she's dealing with something very dark.

Dallas and Peabody start using every detail of Mina's clothing and appearance both to identify her, and to figure out where she'd been most recently, and who killed her. The signs are very strange indeed. Her pants are good quality but fairly ordinary private school uniform pants. Her blouse equally ordinary to initial appearance, but of high-quality cloth and individually tailored to her.

Her underwear is also clearly expensive--and very, very sexy, not what most thirteen-year-olds could afford, or would even want.

None of these expensive items have labels.

It's looking very much like someone was grooming her, in the nasty sense of "grooming."

Roarke can't help recognizing the potential similarities to what happened to Eve, and how it is putting extra stress on her. Trying to protect Lt. Dallas, though, goes as well as it ever does, and she feels, precisely because of the similarities, absolutely obligated to solve this one and rescue any other girls who may be at risk.

And as they realize there was another girl with Mina, and identify her from her blood on Mina's pants, they start to find a few cracks in the case, indications of something sophisticated, monstrously evil, and much, much larger than they could have suspected.

Dorian, in the meantime, has by luck found a place to hide, that might even be safe, and her memory begins to come back.

We also get some glimpses of the perpetrators, both what they're doing, and what, beyond the obvious, they are like.

Dallas, Peabody, Dallas's "bullpen" of detectives and uniformed officers, Dr. Mira, forensics tech Berenski, Medical Examiner Morris, ADA Reo, Mavis, and Summerset as well as others make their appearances, and even those normally combative toward Dallas are this time solidly behind her because of the nature of the case. It's a case that also forces Dallas to confront her past in a different way, as she discovers that even not having nightmares anymore isn't quite enough and there's more progress to make in her healing.

There's some hard scenes in this one, but we also both girls and women showing great personal strength in terrifying circumstances, and all kinds of people, male and female,
young and old, showing fundamental decency when it counts.

Yes, there are the evil scum, too, but there wouldn't be a story without them.

It's another very good entry in the In Death series. Very enjoyable.

I bought this audiobook. ( )