Friday, February 17, 2012 1:52 PM

It’s hard to know where to start with J D Robb, creator of the futuristic ‘In Death’ crime novels. She’s stunningly prolific, averaging two books a year since she started the series in 1995 and taking her heroine, New York Police and Security Department homicide cop Eve Dallas, on multiple wild rides since.

But in truth, the books represent only a small proportion of her output: the woman behind Robb, romance writer Nora Roberts, produces a manuscript every 45 days.
When, breathless and exhausted halfway through the latest Robb adventure, Celebrity in Death, you wonder how on earth Eve, her billionaire industrialist husband Roarke, and faithful partner Peabody can hack the hazardous pace, reflect on whose fertile mind and fingers she sprang from and know you have your answer.

The murder of a movie star is the subject of Celebrity in Death, and the victim, KT Harris, can scarcely be considered unfortunate. Her co-stars on the film (or vid, in mid-21st-century-speak) she was working on, which happens to dramatize Eve’s most famous case, loathe and fear her in equal measure. Their assessments of the woman – “She wasn’t happy and she wasn’t nice”; “She was a sick, bitter bully” – are borne out by Eve and Peabody’s digging, which reveals a history of blackmail, manipulation and wanton destruction.

KT’s death occurs by the rooftop pool at a riotous dinner party hosted at the director’s lavish home and attended by the cast and those they are portraying. This set-up affords Robb the clever conceit of an Agatha Christie-esque narrative, in that the murder could only have been committed by another, or others, present. Wisely, Robb declines to make too much of the possibilities, and Eve, channeling the implacable Hercule Poirot as she interviews each of the party guests, is quick to name those she views as persons of interest.

Celebrity in Death is no ordinary whodunit – aside from the futuristic setting, the details of which add a creative frisson – it’s riotous, at times profane, and unfailingly engaging. Through more than 30 books, Eve has built a delightful rapport with Peabody and a deep connection with Roarke, who is devoted to his role as her protector, and Robb mines these relationships deftly for dramatic potential and emotional effect.

She makes the smart move of weaving victim and villain into a single character: KT took after her violent, substance-abusing father, and when she wasn’t hiring a PI to break into a co-star’s home looking for dirt, she was blackmailing another over his booze-fuelled misadventure with underage girls. She did, in fact, appear to have unearthed unpleasant data on virtually everyone involved in her current project, and one element the investigation is not wanting for is motive.

In the final telling, Celebrity in Death fits inside a standard whodunit format, but Robb/Roberts, whose imaginative powers and sheer stamina must be the envy even of other bestselling writers, fluidly takes her story and its people beyond ordinary time and place.