NAKED IN DEATH: In Death, Book 1

Naked In Death: In Death Book 1
By J.D. Robb
Narrated by Susan Ericksen

A Morality Play with no Sense of Morality

This is a standard police procedural with a typical driven officer as the protagonist. Perhaps the character changes over the course of this long series, perhaps she comes to realize the futility of her rejection of morality, and perhaps then I would grow a level of respect for this character. As it is now, I find Eve Dallas to be a mere product of her society, going along with the decaying mores of the masses. She has the spirit of a rebel but it is the James Dean variety: a rebel without a cause. She diligently strives to hunt down the lawbreakers and along the way takes pot shots on the defining morality issue of our present day: abortion. The world of Lt. Eve Dallas is 50 years in our future and society has, predictably, degenerated from the not so lofty position it resides in today. As the book progressed I found that I recognized Ms. Dallas to be a product of her time. She has no definable religion, no mention of God as a factor in her thoughts. She has no compunction in letting herself be seduced by a rich playboy. Her best friend encourages her in this illicit relationship. ***SPOILER ALERT*** All this would only serve to flesh out one of any number of real people from our own time and would have made this a realistic secular crime novel, but the author chooses to make the perpetrator a conservative politician, a man pushing morality as his political agenda while hypocritically engaging in the very acts he is campaigning against, and somehow this then justifies Lt. Dallas into thinking she now occupies the moral high ground. It is a sad commentary on our time when the protagonist can be portrayed as the “good gal” when she herself lives in the same moral gutter as the perpetrator. I don’t appreciate this attempt at moralizing when there are no standards given for morality.

My second gripe is that the author seems to reject the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. Her near-future world lives under a “gun ban.” We are inculcated more than once on misleading statistics on the frequency of murder by handguns in the old USA (the early 21^st century), and how the world is so much the better place now that guns have been banned. The facts do not bear this theory out; so it was very difficult, nay impossible, for me to suspend my disbelief and consider this a serious story about real people. Ironically, despite the gun ban the crimes in the novel are committed by people using banned guns.

Susan Erickson was a suitable narrator for this novel since it was written by a woman and the main character is also a woman. Her portrayal of the female voices is very good. To my, admittedly male, ears she did not adequately achieve the deeper intonations of the male character voices. Because of this the book seemed to be a mixed-gender play being performed by a all-girl cast. This must be what ancient Greek theater or Japanese Kabuki must be like for those in the audience: they have to pretend that they are seeing men and women. I had to pretend that some of the voices I was hearing were men talking. At times this was a bit of a stretch.