Naked in Death

I enjoyed this book. Not as good as the Key trilogy (my other Roberts venture) but still good. Eve Dallas is a great, tough, interesting character and I want to read more books in the series. Here's the deal: female characters in genre fiction are becoming more and more interesting to me than women in literary fiction. I read a lot of literary fiction by “serious female writers” for my book club. I'm getting disappointed in the decisions (or lack thereof) of female characters. Stuff just happens to them! They aren't in control of events or the narrative! WTF? It's almost 2010 folks, and woman isn't synonymous with victim. I used to just think it was the Oprah books but it's more than that. Anyway, more women's fiction on the horizon for me. I'm getting on the ranty bandwagon with Jennifer Weiner.

2.5 stars. My mistake in reading this book is going in expecting a mystery-thriller with some romance elements. In fact, it is a hybrid of full blown romance and police procedural mystery, swinging in between those two genres for most of the book. My mismatched expectations probably contributed to lessen my enjoyment for this book, but overall, it was a quick and decent read.

The book opens with a rather grisly murder of a “licensed companion”, Sharon DeBlass, who also happens to be the granddaughter of a US Senator. The murderer also leaves behind a calling card stating the Sharon is just one out of six murders. Lt. Eve Dallas is put in charge of the investigations, and is personally committed to preventing five more lives from being lost. The prime suspect of the case, Irish businessman and tycoon Roarke, also proves to be unexpectedly attractive.

As I've already mentioned, I might've enjoyed this book better if I had known beforehand that it was going to be half-mystery and half-romance. But I didn't. So I spent at least the first half of the book feeling a little confused at why there was so much emphasis on Dallas and Roarke's budding mutual interest in each other, and a lot less being said on the actual investigation or finding out more about other suspects besides Roarke.

A huge issue I had with this book was that - I just didn't like Roarke for most of it. The thing he had with Eve was pretty much insta-lust which is already a trope that I'm not really a fan of in romance novels. Then there's this male alpha dominant courtship style that is his way of flirting with Eve, which I am very repulsed by in general, although I can see why this wasn't so bad when the book was written in the mid-90's. This is, of course, very subjective.

He pursues Eve somewhat relentlessly even when she's pushing him away. It's best exemplified when he basically breaks into her house (he does own the building she lives in but honestly I don't think that made a difference in his decision) to wait for her to come home. Although he has no sinister intentions, and really only wanted to see her and give her food, this invasion of her privacy (which she does call out) doesn't seem to matter to him at all - in fact, when he tells himself that he's not going to snoop around her apartment to see her stuff, he thinks: “It was not so much respect for her privacy as it was the challenge she presented that provoked him to discover her from the woman alone rather than her surroundings.” Even when he's in her house, he starts smoking and she says, “I didn't say you could smoke in here.” and instead of putting out his cigarette, he just says, “You didn't arrest me for breaking and entering, you're not going to arrest me for smoking.” I meaaan... to each their own, but this style of aggressive male dominance just didn't sit well for me.

What was extremely confusing to me was how much energy this book spent on trying to establish Roarke as the prime suspect. I felt that it was clear, as the love interest, that he wasn't going to be the killer. I just wasn't convinced, from anything I've read in the book, that J D Robb was going to pull that sort of twist - and I was correct in the end. His status as a suspect was really just to create some added tension in the burgeoning romance between him and Eve, which I thought didn't work out very well. I spent almost the whole book feeling no tension whatsoever because, while there were other suspicious characters around, we didn't spend remotely enough time with them to know who else we could suspect.

The way the investigation was conducted was also very strangely lax. Eve wants to investigate Roarke's gun collection, as Sharon DeBlass was killed by a gun, which is considered an antique weapon to get one's hands on by the time this book is set in the year 2058, and it just happens that Roarke is one of the few rich people around who has a collection of them. She does so not by showing up unannounced and therefore with an element of surprise, but in fact makes an appointment with Roarke to meet him at his house to see his collection. Roarke takes this opportunity to wine and dine Eve, preparing a candlelit dinner and whatnot as a precursor to touring her around his gun collection. She accepts being wined and dined. What kind of investigation is this?! Later on, when she repeatedly asks Roarke the same questions regarding his relationship to the victim, he sighs in frustration and she takes this as “a very good sign of his innocence”. What?!

I'll say that the last 25% of the book got more engaging to me because Eve and Roarke are finally in some vague sort of relationship and I no longer have to deal with Roarke's male-dominance act, he in fact becomes a lot more tolerable and caring with Eve when he's not trying to court her and also because the story finally starts to become more focused on the resolution of the mystery instead of swinging between that and the budding romance all the time. The revelations at the end were quite heavy and might be triggering topics to some, but I felt that they were dealt with in a fairly in-depth way that didn't make light of the subject matter, an approach that I could get behind.

Overall, this was a decent read that had its pros and cons, although I wouldn't say it was an easy read at all because while it sometimes seemed frivolous, it dealt with some pretty heavy subject matters.