Comments on Promises in Death and Kindred in Death by J.D. Robb

Over the last two weeks of heart attack /pinkeye / not heart attack/ head cold/ pinkeye AGAIN (HI! Me this time! Grrrrrr....) it's seemed like a major committment to pick up an actual book. I look at them and I want to read them, but ehhhhhh. What has been easy for me is to read books on my phone, I have no idea why. I was lucky enough that my library system had the next two J. D. Robb books available as e-books and I downloaded them both. Promises in Death is #34 in the series (if you count the short stories), and Kindred in Death is #35 (duh.) (For a complete list in order of the In Death books, click here.) This is one series that I think you should read in order, so that you understand the relationships between the reoccuring characters. I have an awful memory for plot, so if you were to talk about Thing X happening in Book #Z, I'd have no idea what you're talking about, but I do remember the arc of the characters as it progresses along the books. I also have no idea how the titles relate to the plot, and the titles do nothing at all to help me remember what happened in any one book.

Promises in Death and Kindred in Death actually turned out to have a lot of similarites. In Promises, it's a cop that is murdered, and in Kindred it's the child of a cop, so in both books you have a lot of interdepartment cooperation and Eve barely has to bribe anyone to get faster results. I'm not going to go into great plot detail, but I will say that both books follow the series well, and most of the characters behave as past books would indicate. Robb is able to flesh out one of my favorite characters (Morris) quite a bit more, and there are a couple of nice scenes with Trueheart and Baxter. Once again I'm a little tired of the Eve/ Summerset antagonism (get over it already), and I'm really bored of Eve's fear of Trina.  I thought that these two both has instances of humor between Eve and Roarke that seemed out of character, even if they were funny. Obviously, little things like this won't stop me from reading, but I would kind of like to be completely current on the series. It looks like there are five more published and one coming out in September. Sadly, I think two in a row is about all the Eve I can handle in any given period.


(Please excuse the complete incoherence in this post. I'm not quite operating at 100%.)