Just Finished Reading JD Robb's Thankless in Death

Back in October a few weeks ago, my home county of Alachua, Florida held its twice-a-year Friends of the Library book sale here in Gainesville.  Sometimes I go to this event and sometimes I don't.  I went there this time around, looking for cheap paperback novels that weren't all tied into a series.  Among the books, I discovered one by J.D. Robb titled Thankless in Death.  Reading the cover, it didn't give a sign that this was part of a multi-volume series, so I paid the fifty cents and bought it.  Later, though, when I opened it and began to read, I discovered that, although the story in itself didn't directly hinge on earlier ones, it was still part of a very long (more than forty books) string of books featuring the same lead characters...the "in Death" series.  In this regard it reminded me of Sue Grafton's "A,B,C, etc. is For" series, where the protagonists stay the same from book to book but their lives and relationships develop.

With the "in Death" series of Robb, incidentally a pseudonym for Nora Roberts, the real author, the setting is a future (year 2060) New York City (Manhattan) and the main characters are police captain Eve Dallas, her immediate co-workers, and her husband Roarke, an Irish orphaned genius who became a super-wealthy builder in America.  Being set in the future a few decades, the vocabulary of speech has changed a little and it sometimes took me a little bit of effort to figure what they were talking about.  Also, there are innovations like servant robots (that can go out in town and buy stuff and bring it back) and a universal food/beverage device/system called "Autochef".  But besides this, what this series is about, as exemplified by the novel I read, is a police detective working hard to catch really very nasty, bad people....and you can infer from the series title that it focuses on the crime of murder.  Also, the employment climate of the future is one of great opportunity for women, for many of them figure heavily in the police force and story.

Thankless in Death is a crime novel in a series of crime novels...in retrospect it might have been better to start with the first book in order to better follow the character development from book to book.  Then again, I can't see myself following this series through more than forty books.  It's a pretty standard "catch the bad guy" detective story, once you factor out the futuristic gimmickry. Not that I particularly disliked it, mind you, but I was left feeling that there was little in what protagonist Eve Dallas did that distinguished her as a memorable character...and that's an important consideration for me as a potentially repeat reader...