Immortal in Death: Dallas takes on skinny supermodels

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The good news is that this one is infinitely better than the second one, which had the leads behaving like unlikable high school students. I finished this one much quicker.

I assume that this series started as one of Roberts' many trilogies because there's no real reason for Eve and Roarke to jump from meeting, to getting engaged, to fairy-tale wedding that Eve totally doesn't want, for realsies, in three books. Especially when their issues get rehashed over and over again in future installments.

The wedding stuff is pretty boring, perhaps because it's difficult to get into the fairy-tail-ness of it all when Eve acts like she's marching towards an execution. I'm not entirely sure why Roarke insists on it when they could easily get married legally and take a private trip to some outer space colony or something. It leaves me feeling like the party is all for fan-service's sake, and it ends up throwing me out of the book. I know I'm a lady reading a romantic thriller, and that part of it is wish-fulfillment (though I've never fantasized about a fairy tale wedding, to be honest), but I don't need the female lead to be tortured with some fancy party where she has to wear a custom-made designer dress. Really.

Enough complaints, though. As I said when I started, I mostly enjoyed this book. It starts with Eve going to visit an up-and-coming designer for the aforementioned dumb wedding. The designer happens to be dating her BFF Mavis while trying to break off a relationship with the supermodel "Pandora", who of course shows up to make a scene as Eve is getting her measurements taken (while naked, also of course).
Pandora is pretty much a telenovela villana. She doesn't love Leonardo (the designer), but she refuses to let him be the one to end their "relationship". When he tries to end it, she decides that she's going to ruin him professionally and financially. And Mavis too, while she as it. All other characters hate her, including the men she has sex with. She's described as very gorgeous, but incapable of emoting, which makes her unable to pursue her "dream" of becoming an actress. Perhaps unintentionally, she's the funnest character in the book. Even though she dies in the first act. Just reading other characters describe her is amusing as hell.

Anyway, Pandora is murdered and Mavis looks like the prime suspect. The bulk of the book involves Eve trying to prove Mavis' innocence while taking part in the dumb wedding to cheer her up. There's a point where Mavis gets to live in Roarke's NYC castle with Eve even though Eve is the primary investigator in a murder case where she's the prime suspect, but whatever, I guess. In the second book, Even went to confront a kidnapper without alerting anyone even though she's cop with ten years of experience, so I'm guessing realistic police procedure is not one of Roberts' priorities.

I suspect Roberts might be trying for some commentary on beauty standards, but whatever it is falls flat for me. There are mentions of futuristic drugs and unhealthy eating habits among the models to suggest that their job is dangerous, but then Roberts gives her heroine measurements that might make a runway model queasy (Eve's BMI: 17.7, underweight to the point that doctors would freak out).

It's like Roberts' decided to make some kind of statement about the fashion industry's beauty standards, but couldn't resist the temptation of making her heroine fit those standards herself. But naturally, of course. She's so busy she forgets to eat and sleep, yet she's still fit enough to take on Roarke in a boxing match.

On another nitpicky point, I didn't like the little scene where Roarke noticed that Eve was looking better than usual, but couldn't for the life figure out ~why~ (Eve had gotten a professional haircut). It just seemed incredibly silly that he'd be an example of the "males don't get lady haircuts lololol" when he's the one who picks out Eve's wardrobe 90% of the time. Clearly, the man is fashion conscious, so why wouldn't he notice that the woman he loves got a haircut?

But enough griping. This book was reasonably well-paced, the mystery engaging (even if Roberts' understanding of pharmacology is lacking), and it provides a great deal of backstory for Eve. I still suspect that this was meant to be a trilogy, but it's probably for the best. I bet the reveal about Eve's dark past would have taken twenty books if Roberts' hadn't been planning to end it soon. God knows she dwells on it a lot in the following installments.