Reunion in Death (In Death, 14)

Reunion in Death is a crime novel by the American writer Nora Roberts, writing as J. D. Robb, published in 2002. It is the fourteenth of the In Death books, set in a future New York, and it returns to a criminal the series' main character put away early in her career.

The book opens with a birthday party. A man comes home to more than a hundred people waiting for him, an event he has known about for weeks, and the actual surprise is the drink that kills him. The woman who gives it to him leaves before anyone connects her with what has happened.

Eve Dallas recognises her at once. Julie Dockport was sent to prison about a decade earlier after an investigation that Dallas conducted herself, and she has now been released on good behaviour. The novel is built around the question of why a woman who has just regained her freedom would spend it on a murder that puts her name, immediately and unmistakably, in front of the detective who caught her. Dallas has to work out what Dockport wants before anybody else at the party dies.