Golden in Death by JD Robb, narrated by Susan Ericksen – B+ Can you even believe this is book 50 in the In Death series?? That must be some kind of record. Normally, I bail out of a series at about book 12 or so but I’m still up for stories about Eve Dallas, Roarke and the rest of the crew. I am desperate for Morris to get a HEA – maybe next book??

Golden in Death has the trademark characters I care about in a very short time. The families of the victims, most of the victims themselves were all well drawn as usual.

This book had many twisty turns and red herrings so it took a long time (in terms of listening, not in terms of days of investigation by Eve and Peabody) to get ID the who-did-it. I liked this. It felt like the kind of thing that might occur in a real police investigation. I also liked that Roarke had a part to play in the investigation but it wasn’t massive. Most of the work was Eve and Peabody. While McNab and even Feeney were involved, it was mainly the core two detectives and that was a little different to previous books as well.

There was one thing that kind of threw me. I don’t want to give too much away because spoilers but there were two people I thought would have massive targets on their backs and they were never actually targets and Eve/Peabody never warned them just in case. The book didn’t really explain that.

There were a couple of homophobic slurs used in the book but they were used by people who were not good people and the narrative did not support that the language was okay. Personally, I could let it pass but I’m not gay so maybe others will have different views and members of the queer community’s views should take priority over mine here. I did like that there was more queer representation and it was positive and supportive (with only the above exception). Where I’ve really had a problem in previous books is where there have been transphobic slurs or used by “good” characters.

I continue to enjoy the In Death series. Golden in Death is a worthy entry. Not the best, not the worst. It’s a series that’s reliably good and after 50 books, that’s really something.

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Reviews of these books will be up soon at AudioGals.