The latest update from 2061 pits Lt. Eve Dallas against a crew of professional-grade child traffickers.
All too soon after Dorian Gregg is taken under the wing of Mina Cabot, another 13-year-old Pretty One who’s been snatched from the street and imprisoned in the malignant Academy, their friendship ends when Dorian hurts herself during their nocturnal escape attempt and Mina heroically sacrifices herself and ends up dead. Terrified of every stranger she meets, Dorian falls in with a bunch of street kids who show her more kindness than she’s seen in years. Meanwhile, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, identify the dead girl as Mina, realize that she’s been held captive in luxurious servitude for months (who’d have the interest or the resources for that?), get wind of her vanished companion, and begin a frantic search that will harness the full resources of the NYPSD; Dallas’ billionaire husband, Roarke; and those street kids. Locating Dorian, who was criminally neglected by both her mother and the who-cares Child Services employee assigned to her case, turns out to be less trouble than returning her to something like a normal life, a transition for which Dallas draws freely on her own traumatic history. Robb strains to generate suspense from Dallas’ duel with an illegal organization as formidable in its way as her own legal one, and a good deal better organized. For better or worse, though, this is a full-throated but not especially original indictment of child trafficking wrapped up in a futuristic procedural.
Target audience: readers interested in the differences between Pretty Ones, Servants, Breeders, and Pets.