Born in Death / Innocent in Death (In Death #23-24)

Born in Death
Technology has advanced in 2060 New York City, but childbirth has been the same since the beginning of time. And despite the brutal double homicide on Lieutenant Eve Dallas’s caseload, she has to be there for her pregnant friend Mavis, even if it means throwing the dreaded baby shower. . .

But Mavis needs an even bigger favor now. Tandy Willowby, one of the moms-to-be in her class, has gone missing, just days before her due date – not even showing up at the shower at Eve and Roarke’s place that she’d been looking forward to so much. A recent emigrant from London, Tandy has few friends in New York, and no family. When Eve enters Tandy’s apartment and finds Mavis’s shower gift wrapped and ready on the table - and Tandy’s packed hospital bag still on the floor - her spine starts tingling.

Normally, this would be turned over to Missing Persons. Eve has more than enough on her plate trying to find out who murdered Natalie Copperfield and her fiancé, both employed at a highly prestigious accounting firm. But Mavis wants no one but Eve on the case - and Eve can’t say no. She’ll have to track Tandy down while tracing the deals and double-crosses hidden in the files of some of the city’s richest and most secretive citizens, in a race against a particularly vicious killer. Luckily, she has her multimillionaire husband Roarke’s expertise to help with the numbers-crunching. But as he mines for the crucial data that will break the case wide open, Eve faces an all-too-real danger in the flesh-and-blood world.

Innocent in Death
The death of history teacher Craig Foster devastated his young wife, who’d sent him off to work that morning with a lovingly packed lunch. It shocked his colleagues at the Upper West Side private school. And as for the ten-year-old girls who found him in his classroom in a pool of bodily fluids, they may have been traumatized for life.

Lieutenant Eve Dallas, of course, is more hardened to murder cases. And this is clearly a murder case. That lovingly packed lunch was tainted with deadly ricin. And Mr. Foster’s colleagues, shocked as they may be, have some shocking secrets of their own. It’s Eve’s job to get a feel for all the potential suspects, and find out why someone would have done this to a man who seemed so inoffensive, so pleasant…so innocent.

Now Magdelana Percell – there’s someone Eve can picture as a murder victim. Possibly at Eve’s own hands. The slinky blonde - an old flame of her billionaire husband, Roarke, from his days on the wrong side of the law – has turned up in New York, and she’s anything but innocent. Unfortunately, Roarke seems blind to Magdelana’s manipulation, but not to her shapely figure and flirtatious ways. And he insists that the occasional lunch or business meeting with her is nothing to worry about…and none of Eve’s business. Eve’s so unnerved by the situation that she finds it hard to focus on the Foster case. Still, she’ll have to put aside her anger, jealousy, and heartbreak, for a while at least - because another man has just turned up dead, and the case is taking some strange turns and hitting some frustrating dead ends.

Eve knows all too well that innocence can be a façade. Keeping that in mind may help her solve this case at last. But it may also tear apart her marriage.