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 Once You Swallow the Bolonium, It's Pretty Good
Purity in Death
"J.D.Robb" [Nora Roberts]
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I once heard an author, on a panel at a science fiction convention, explain that she used a simple rule in setting up the backgrounds for her SF stories: you are permitted to introduce one piece of the miracle element "Bolonium" (which can do or be anything the author wants) into your story, but after that you can't do anything else contrary to fact in your storytelling.
Robb gets away with two chunks, but, since one is the underlying pseudo-science-fiction setting in the year 2059 introduced at the very beginning of the series, i'll give her a bye on that one.
My wife and i are both involved professionally with computers, and she told me that she was afraid i wasn't going to like this book because it involved a computer virus that could attack human brains. I explained the Bolonium Hypothesis to her; and, as i expected (based on previous Dallas/Roarke mysteries), while i didn't believe for a moment that such a thing could happen, if i accepted that it could, i was in for a pretty good romance/police procedural novel as Dallas and company mobilised to catch the Bad Guys.
Said Bad Guys are a group of vigilante-types who are out to bring their own brand of "justice" to child-predators who cannot be touched by the law; as is often the case in plots of this type, the initial public reaction to their actions and manifestos is guardedly favourable -- after all, they're only attacking nasty child-molestors.
But Dallas and her people are aware that people who deal extra-legal "justice" to one class of offendor are likely to expand their attentiosn to others. And not everyone agrees as to just who ought to die for his "crimes". A child-molestor? Quite possibly. A dealer in nasty drugs? Maybe.
A jay-walker, perhaps?
As usual, Robb delivers the goods, specially in the secondary characters with which this series is so rich. Peabody and McNabb have particularly strong (and uncharacteristic, but completely in-character) roles to play, and Mavis has a Startling Announcement.
While you can start the series with this volume (or any other), i really think you'll have more fun if you start with the first and read them in order. |
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