Fantasy in Death

From Publishers Weekly Lt. Eve Dallas, a top homicide cop for the New York Police and Security Department (the law enforcement agency for a mid 21st-century New York City), faces one of the more challenging cases of her career in bestseller Robb's exciting 31st in death novel (after Kindred in Death ). When someone cuts off the head of Bart Minnock, the genius founder of the computer gaming company U-Play, apparently while he was role-playing against an imaginary opponent in a prototype of a fantasy adventure that could rock the industry, Eve investigates. Security logs show no one entered Minnock's building around the time of his murder, presenting a futuristic variation on the classic locked-room mystery. Aided by her husband, Roarke, who was a potential business rival of the victim, Dallas focuses on who would benefit from Minnock's death. Robb is the pseudonym of romantic suspense author Nora Roberts. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Even though Fantastical was still in the testing phase, Bart Minnock was certain the virtual-reality game would murder the competition. Instead, Bart is the one found dead. Now Lieutenant Eve Dallas has to come up with a plausible theory as to how someone could bypass the foolproof security in the millionaire’s holo-room and decapitate him. The fact that the popular gaming guru doesn’t seem to have any enemies isn’t making Eve’s job any easier, but the more time Eve spends investigating the case, the more evidence she finds that several people may have had a reason for wanting Bart out of the way. Now, with a little hands-on training from her husband, Roarke, a computer-gaming expert, Eve sets out to write a program for catching a clever killer. In the thirtieth addition to her best-selling Eve Dallas series, Robb successfully mixes a classic locked-room murder with plenty of cutting-edge twenty-first-century technology, and the end result is an ingenious tale of crime that delivers plenty of Robb’s patented dangerous chills and passionate thrills --John Charles An Eve Dallas Investigation In Death They were best friends, driven by one shared vision - to rule the world of virtual reality games. Cill, hard-edged and beautiful, Var and Benny, brains and business acumen, and Bart, the genius behind the idea. Their newest invention, developed to transport the player into a fantastical virtual world, is just about to be launched. Bart Minnock, the founder of the computer-gaming giant U-Play, enters his private playroom, and eagerly can't wait to lose himself in an imaginary world, to play the role of a sword-wielding warrior king, in his company's latest top-secret project, Fantastical. The next morning, he is found in the same locked room, in a pool of blood, his head separated from his body, defeated by their own game. Their close-knit group is torn apart. Who could have engineered a virtual death with such devastating consequences? It is the most puzzling case NYPSD Lieutenant Eve Dallas has ever faced, and it is not a game... Eve is having as much trouble figuring out how Bart was murdered as who did the murdering. The victim's girlfriend seems sincerely grief-stricken, and his quirky-but-brilliant partners at U-Play appear equally shocked. No one seemed to have a probA-lem with the enthusiastic, high-spirited millionaire. Of course, success can attract jealousy, and gaming, like any business, has its fierce rivalries and dirty tricks-as Eve's husband, Roarke, one of U- Play's competitors, knows well. But Bart was not naive, and quite capable of fighting back in the real world as well as the virtual one. Eve and her team are about to enter the next level of police work, in a world where fantasy is the ultimate seduction-and the price of defeat is death... But as she digs deeper, peeling back layers of secrets, revenge and misplaced allegiances, she realises with growing dread the depth of the killer's master plan. And she knows his game is far from over....