It is late May 2061 as Forgotten in Death: An Eve Dallas Novel by J. D. Robb begins. begins. It is a pretty early morning and Eve Dallas is on duty and working at a rubble strewn construction site in Hudson Yards. She has been dispatched to a body in a construction site dumpster.

The trail of blood from the fencing four feet away to the side of the construction dumpster was the first clue for a worker earlier that morning. The body in a sheet with her head significantly brutalized was the second. The victim was clearly dead as the body laid on top of the load in the dumpster. The plastic over it had not done much to hide that fact.

It is while Lieutenant Eve Dallas of the NYPSD is on that scene, that she is informed that another body has been found a block away. A worker there has also found a dead body. Upon arrival, it is clear that the body is from many years ago. It was buried behind a wall and under some flooring as a restaurant was built above her. She was also pregnant. It is also a site owned by Roarke as his company seeks to redevelop a site that had shoddy construction just after the Urban Wars ended.

Are the bodies linked, even though they are decades apart? Or, is it just coincidence that the killings just happened to come to light at the same time.

Dallas, Peabody, and others investigate in Forgotten in Death: An Eve Dallas Novel. The result is an entertaining and fast paced police procedural. A lot has changed by 2061, but people are people, and they still kill for all the classic reasons.

My digital reading copy came through the Libbby/OverDrive account by way of the Dallas Public Library System.

Kevin R. Tipple © 2024 ( )

DNF ( )

Solid palate-cleansing/reset read, entertaining, and not the worst of the series. ( )

Two murder victims--one recently deceased and one deceased long enough to be only a skeleton--land on Eve's plate. It feels like Eve and Roarke do most of the investigating in this one (rather than the usual Eve and Peabody). ( )

Eve is called to the scene of the murder of a homeless woman knows to the cops of the area as a woman who offered paper flowers to people in return for some spare change. She was also known to write down infractions - rule breaking - and bring them to the attention of the police.

As Eve investigates the woman's death - Alva Quirk by name - she is called to another scene. Bones of a woman and fetus were found in the demolition of a building site that Roarke's company is rehabbing. Since Dr. DeWinter - forensic anthropologist - has to do her magic to identify that woman, Eve is concentrating on Alva.

She brings in Roarke to help identify her since her ID is bogus. Medical examination indicates that she had likely suffered abuse in her younger years which causes a resonance with Eve's own past. While identifying who murdered her now, Eve is also determined to find and bring down the person who abused her in the past.

Both sites where bodies were found belong to, or belonged to, the Singer family who had a connection with a Russian mobster that went back decades. As Eve looks into the Singer's business dealings, she gets much closer to solving both crimes.

I enjoyed this episode in the long-running In Death series even though it lacked some of the banter between Eve and Peabody and Eve and Roarke that were hallmarks of earlier books. It was still an engaging and intense episode. ( )