Bart Minnock, founder of the computer gaming giant U-Play, enters his private room, and eagerly can't wait to lose himself in an imaginary world, to take on the role of a sword-wielding warrior king, in his company's latest top-secret project, Fantastical.The next morning, he is found in the same locked room, in a pool of blood, his head separated from his body. It is the most puzzling case Lieutenant Eve Dallas has ever faced, and it is not a game. . . .She is having as much trouble figuring out how Bart Minnock was murdered as determining who did the murdering. The victim's girlfriend seems sincerely grief-stricken, and his quirky but brilliant partners at U-Play appear shocked as well. No one seems to have had a problem with the enthusiastic, high-spirited millionaire.Of course, success can attract jealousy, and gaming, like any business, has its fierce rivalries and dirty tricks -- as Eve's husband, Roarke, one of U-Play's competitors, knows well. But Minnock was not naive, and he knew how to fight back in the real world as well as the virtual one.Eve and her team are about to enter the next level of police work, in a world where fantasy is the ultimate seduction -- and the price of defeat is death.
"If you haven’t read the thrillers starring Lieutenant Eve Dallas, Salvation In Death is the perfect place to start. J.D. Robb is one of my favorite authors and she has created an iconic female cop—a strong, sexy, and death-defying heroine—with the slyest sense of humor in fiction. I love J.D. Robb and Eve Dallas!" — Lisa Scottoline "Curious corpses, tangled twists, and one sizzling sleuth. Salvation In Death is a triple-whammy winner." — Kathy Reichs
"Curious corpses, tangled twists, and one sizzling sleuth. Salvation In Death is a triple-whammy winner." — Kathy Reichs
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"The thing about Sara Paretsky is, she's tough--not because she observes the bone-breaker conventions of the private-eye genre but because she doesn't flinch from examining old social injustices others might find too shameful (and too painful) to dig up." -- The New York Times Book Review"Doctors take days off -- why not PIs?" V.I. Warshawski demands. But when America's hardest-working private eye goes clubbing, a stranger is shot and dies in her arms.V.I. has been visiting Club Gouge, Chicago's edgiest nightspot, where a woman known as the Body Artist turns her naked body into a canvas for the audience to paint on.The show attracts all kinds of people, from a menacing off-duty cop to Ukrainian mobsters and Iraq war vets -- and V.I.'s impetuous cousin, Petra. A tormented young painter shows up, too, and the intricate designs she creates on the Body Artist drive one of the vets into a violent rage.When the painter is shot, the cops figure it's an easy collar -- PTSD vet goes off the rails, stalks then kills young woman. But the vet's family hires V.I. to clear his name, and the detective uncovers a chain of ugly truths that stretches all the way from Iraq to Chicago's South Side.
The past is never over. It just gets dusty.Lisa Grant was a rising star in a prestigious law firm in Lexington, Kentucky, when the firm went bankrupt and she lost her job. With an ailing mother to care for, she takes the first job she can find: research assistant to District Attorney Scott Buchanan. Scott is as disagreeable as he is sexy, and Lisa suspects the only reason she got the job was Scott's fond feelings for her mother, who treated him well when he was just a farmhand on the Grants' large horse farm while Lisa was growing up.After she misses an important court date, Lisa doesn't get any special treatment from Scott. As punishment, he sends her to organize cold-case files in the basement of the courthouse. What Lisa expects to be a mind-numbingly boring task turns into anything but that when a missing-persons case draws her attention. The details of the case are engrossing: an entire family -- father, mother, and two children -- disappeared without a trace more than twenty-eight years ago. Except that's not all: the mother in a photo Lisa finds could be her own twin. Before Lisa can learn more, a series of catastrophes strikes close to home, and she realizes that finding the photo has put her in terrible danger. Determined to uncover the truth, she confides in Scott, and their relationship develops into something beyond that of employer and employee. Together they unravel a terrifying web of criminal connections that could shatter what Lisa knows of her past. And it's clear someone will go to shocking lengths to make sure certain secrets stay hidden.
