Naked in Death by J.D. Robb

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


DNFed, for 2 reasons:
1) There’s something very un-likable about the main character from the first pages. Like she is trying to be cold and professional, but actually looks like she is trying to be nasty on purpose.
2) This whole book is like a string of predictable clichés one after another. And not even nice ones.

The whole book is soaked through with the feeling of “let me show you something vile, because I think it’s cool”.
It’s everywhere: in the word choices (I find the whole ‘our boy’ talk about the killer distasteful and trying to hard, like children trying to play at ‘badasses’; and the distasteful sex talk everywhere), the victim choices (because of course prostitutes shot in face and genitalia, what else is ‘cool’?), the side characters (pompous sexist senator with gun obsession, flaunting beauty salon worker, … and other stereotypes that hardly require any imagination); dominance games; and so on and so forth.
Also, the mind-hopping writing doesn’t do this book any favours.
Then the “mysterious, tall, dark, handsome, and rich” couldn’t have been a bigger cliché if we all tried together.
The expensive presents, the coffee mania, the insta-lust, the prostitutes,… every single thing about the part of this book I read felt like the most overused elements you can find stuck up your nose. With a constant unsavoury undertone to boot.

This book is trying to be a serious futuristic crime suspense…but it stops just there. At trying very hard.



View all my reviews