DELUSION IN DEATH

The latest quarry of Lt. Eve Dallas is the homegrown terrorist who masterminded a pair of unfathomable attacks that left 127 citizens dead.

One minute On the Rocks is a bar full of whatever they call yuppies in 2060 whining about their jobs and plotting seductions; the next minute the yuppies morph into murderous savages who kill each other with cocktail forks, stemware and their bare hands. What could have made 93 model citizens run berserk? Since Eve’s billionaire husband, Roarke, owns On the Rocks, he’s involved in the case from the beginning, but it’s the personnel of the police lab, not Roarke’s minions, who figure out that the disaster was caused by a nefarious gas based on LSD and tweaked with even more dangerous hallucinogens. The attack was so successful that there’s bound to be another one, and so there is, at nearby Café West. But this second outrage leads to a breakthrough when Eve realizes that the two episodes both involve a group of employees from the marketing department of Stevenson and Reede. And the case cracks wide open when she links both attacks to the wild schemes of the late crackpot scientist Guiseppi Menzini and the Red Horse terrorist network. Fighting off nightmares that connect her latest investigation to the unfortunate birth parents she identified in New York to Dallas (2011), she zeroes in on the killer.

The detection is uninspired and a bit of a slog. As so often in this bestselling series, the high point is the police interrogation of the perp—this time by a corps of five strong women who unite to bamboozle him in a most satisfying way.