2008-01-30 Free Marnie Now!

I quite enjoyed this. One reason being that for a change Roarke is allowed to show his nasty side...to Trudy...who turns into the victim of murder a few pages later. The more boring In Death books are all those where Roarke is turned into some kind of opinionless crutch for his wife. Which is most of them nowadays. Also. Eve shows her selfish side and then has to apologise to her husband. I enjoyed that too.

Towards the end of the book, the perp, Marnie calls Eve a hypocrite. I agree with her. Eve says that she would have prefered that sadistic foster mom, Trudy, should have been tried for her child abuse crimes and then put in a cage for many many years. But who would have the guts to see that justice was done? Not Eve. She had shut Trudy out of her mind and turned into a pathetic quivering coward the first time she saw her in her adult life. Yet Marnie, another abused foster kid had the balls to hand out vengeance and then had to suffer Eve at her sermonising, insufferably moralising worst. The case of Trudy's death should have been left unsolved and quietly closed.

In any case. This is a prime example of a crime some police forces categorise as 'no humans involved.' That is, one felon committing a crime upon another felon. Why a fairly decent human being such as Eve feels any personal attachment to Trudy is beyond my understanding.

Despite all that. Like I said I enjoyed this novel. Mainly because there are lots of scenes between Roarke and Eve. One relationship that continues to ring false however, is the one between Eve and Summerset. There really is no need for Eve to be so constantly abusive to Sommerset, who is essentially a well-loved servant. Sometimes it seems that she's bullying him. Seeing how she's married to his employer. By now all the readers realise that if it came to a choice between Summerset and Eve, Roarke would choose his wife every time.