An Eve Dallas Investigation In Death
They were best friends, driven by one shared vision - to rule the world of virtual reality games. Cill, hard-edged and beautiful, Var and Benny, brains and business acumen, and Bart, the genius behind the idea. Their newest invention, developed to transport the player into a fantastical virtual world, is just about to be launched.
Bart Minnock, the founder of the computer-gaming giant U-Play, enters his private playroom, and eagerly can't wait to lose himself in an imaginary world, to play 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, defeated by their own game. Their close-knit group is torn apart. Who could have engineered a virtual death with such devastating consequences?
It is the most puzzling case NYPSD Lieutenant Eve Dallas has ever faced, and it is not a game... Eve is having as much trouble figuring out how Bart was murdered as who did the murdering. The victim's girlfriend seems sincerely grief-stricken, and his quirky-but-brilliant partners at U-Play appear equally shocked. No one seemed to have a probA-lem 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 Bart was not naive, and quite capable of fighting 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... But as she digs deeper, peeling back layers of secrets, revenge and misplaced allegiances, she realises with growing dread the depth of the killer's master plan. And she knows his game is far from over....
Add to your library to track progress and write reviews
Find Fantasy in Death J. D. Robb in PDF, EPUB, ebook, audiobook, print, or library editions.
15 books in catalog
Blending futuristic police procedural drama with romantic suspense, the In Death series introduces readers to Lieutenant Eve Dallas, a tough New York City homicide detective working complex murder cases in mid-twenty-first-century Manhattan alongside her mysterious husband, billionaire Roarke. Eleanor Marie Robertson created the pen name J. D. Robb to publish these fast-paced speculative mystery novels, allowing her to explore gritty criminal investigations distinct from her established contemporary romance releases.
Writing as J. D. Robb, the author launched a long-running, bestselling crime saga that began with Naked in Death in 1995. By combining procedural precision, technological world-building, and evolving character dynamics, the series established an enduring presence on national bestseller lists and built an international readership.
Eleanor Marie Robertson was born on October 10, 1950, in Silver Spring, Maryland, as the youngest of five children and the only daughter in a family of Irish heritage. Growing up in a household of avid readers, she developed an early appreciation for books. She attended a Catholic school where nuns instilled a strong sense of personal discipline, before transferring during her sophomore year of high school to a local public school where she met her first husband, Ronald Aufdem-Brinke. On August 17, 1968, shortly after graduating high school, she married Aufdem-Brinke against her parents' wishes, and the couple settled in Keedysville, Maryland. While her husband worked at his father's sheet-metal business and later joined her parents in their lighting company, she worked briefly as a legal secretary, later noting that although she could type fast, her spelling was poor. After the births of their two sons, Dan and Jason, she stayed home during what she described as her "Earth Mother" years, spending her time doing crafts, ceramics, and sewing her children's clothes, before the marriage ended in separation and a final divorce in January 1985.
Her path toward a professional writing career began in February 1979 during a severe winter blizzard. Snowed in with her two young sons, aged three and six, with no kindergarten respite available and a dwindling supply of chocolate, she pulled out a pencil and notebook to write down a story. That initial creative effort led to several draft manuscripts and rejections before her debut novel, Irish Thoroughbred, was published by Silhouette in 1981 under the shortened name Nora Roberts, a pen name chosen under the assumption that all authors adopted pseudonyms. During her early career, she also published a story titled "Melodies of Love" in a magazine under the pseudonym Jill March, and her work was later issued under the name Sarah Hardesty for the "Born In" series releases in the United Kingdom prior to changing publishers.
In July 1985, she married her second husband, Bruce Wilder, whom she had hired to build bookshelves in her home. Wilder owns and operates Turn the Page Books, an independent bookstore in Boonsboro, Maryland, and together the couple expanded their home and traveled extensively. By 1992, wanting to publish futuristic romantic suspense novels without confusing her romance readers, she decided to adopt a new pen name. She initially considered D.J. MacGregor, but discovered that pseudonym was already in use by another writer. In 1995, Berkley published her first futuristic crime novel, Naked in Death, under the pseudonym J. D. Robb, deriving the initials "J.D." from her sons, Jason and Dan, and "Robb" as a shortened form of Roberts.
Beyond her extensive output, she played a pivotal role in the romance genre community as a founding member of the Romance Writers of America (R.W.A.), becoming the first inductee into the organization's Hall of Fame. Her career also involved defending copyright integrity within the publishing industry; after discovering that romance writer Janet Dailey had plagiarized her work—a situation brought to light when a reader noticed striking similarities after reading Roberts's Sweet Revenge and Dailey's Notorious back-to-back—she filed a lawsuit. In 1997, Dailey acknowledged repeatedly plagiarizing Roberts's novels, attributing her actions to a psychological disorder, and both Notorious and Aspen Gold were pulled from print. The legal settlement resulted in an undisclosed sum that Roberts donated to the Literacy Volunteers of America. Her work has also been adapted for television, including the 1989 television movie Magic Moments, the 2001 film Sanctuary starring Melissa Gilbert, and four 2007 Lifetime Television movies: Montana Sky starring Ashley Williams, Carolina Moon starring Claire Forlani, Blue Smoke starring Alicia Witt, and Angel's Fall starring Heather Locklear.
The writing style of J. D. Robb merges hard-boiled police procedural techniques with futuristic science fiction elements and character-focused romance. Set in mid-twenty-first-century New York City, the narratives feature speculative technology—such as auto-chefs, advanced data links, futuristic vehicles, and sophisticated forensic scanners—while grounding the investigative core in classic detective work, forensic evidence, and psychological profiling. Lieutenant Eve Dallas is portrayed as a pragmatic, relentless homicide detective who views her job as standing for the dead, driven by her own survival of childhood trauma.
Central themes across the In Death series focus on the psychological motivations behind violent crime, the nature of evil, justice versus revenge, and the power of love and loyalty to heal past abuse. The evolving marriage between Eve Dallas and Roarke serves as the emotional center of the series, showing how two deeply scarred individuals build mutual trust, vulnerability, and respect. Robb balances intense criminal investigations with a recurring ensemble cast of fellow police officers, forensic experts, and close friends, providing continuity, humor, and warm interpersonal dynamics across every installment.
In Death
