ISBN Leverage in Death book Detective English Paperback 458 pages

Just never really got into it. The villains felt too far off-screen, there was none of the Dallas Peabody repartee that I enjoy and not much Dallas-Roarke interplay either. The story felt somewhat perfunctory, and there was little satisfaction in the villains being caught—perhaps because their motivation felt so unreal. I was hoping we’d get more of the Econo CEO, Willemina (?) or the children of the Quantum CEO, as they seemed the most real of the secondary characters, but they disappeared from the story after a the first few chapters.My other least favorite book in the series also had close friends as the murderers, so maybe it works less well to have Dallas squaring off against a team... Or maybe in order to work, a team of villains would have to have just as deeply emotional a bond as Dallas has with Peabody or Roarke...Perhaps the biggest problem, however, was the sheer number of victims. The strong suit of these books is Dallas’s ability to get into people’s heads and hearts, and with so many dead, there was no central person for Dallas to engage with. The dead just became a string of names and a few interchanges between Dallas/Peabody and the families, and that wasn’t enough to provide the book with a heart. The Oscars coverage at the end might have been intended to ground the story in Dallas’s relationships with the people who love/are loved by her, but it simply felt disjointed, a reminder for me more of what was missing in this book than anything else. Hope the next one is better!