This is a decent crime procedural overall. The story immediately starts off with the crime, which turns out to be darker and more gruesome than I expected. Then the main character Lieutenant Dallas spends the rest of the story making slow and steady progress towards solving the crime and capturing the killer with her team. Once I had gone about half-way into the book, I started to see where it's going. I figured out by then who was the most likely suspect, though it was still interesting to read to the end and see the crime wrapped up.
While I've previously read Nora Roberts novels, this is my first time reading the author under her pseudonym J. D. Robb. I was curious to see how Roberts would write under her suspense/crime pen name, and the story definitely retains some of that Nora Roberts feel. If you've read any of the author's romance novels published under her real name, you know that her characters can be a bit hokey, so it's no surprise that this carries over to her suspense pen name. Lieutenant Dallas is portrayed as a broken woman who has suffered tremendously in her life, but she's lucky to have married a billionaire who adores her and buys her whatever she wants, though she protests of course. Some of the dialog in there is correspondingly hokey too, though it doesn't take away from the fun, fast read that this is.
One thing that distracted from the book is that it sometimes reads like it hasn't been properly edited yet. Some sentences are awkward and hard to understand. And sometimes when a bunch of characters are introduced at once, they just refer to them by name in the future without subtly reminding the readers again who they are. This means the reader has to go back and re-read parts just to understand everything. They're minor things that a good editor should have caught and corrected, but for some reason they made it into the finished version.
Readaroo Rating: 3 stars
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