In Death/YMMV
< In Death
- Complete Monster - Lots of them, but especially Richard Troy, Eve's father.
- Eve's mother is hinted to be this a few times throughout the series, and is fully revealed to be this in New York To Dallas. For starters, Stella is apparently not her real name. In fact, she has also gone by the names Sister Suzan, Sarajo Whitehead, and Sylvia Prentiss. She may not even have a name. She is a drug addict and engaged in prostitution. She also boosted cars, and ran all sorts of cons. She had consensual rough sex with a guy and pretended to be raped so she could get close to one rape counselor and eventually kidnap her. She partnered up with Richard Troy and had Eve Dallas just so she can get money. She stole Troy's money and ran off, knowing what Troy was going to do to Eve and considered Eve worthless, detestable and not worth remembering. She partnered up with pedophile and Complete Monster Isaac McQueen to kidnap people and try to help Isaac get revenge on Dallas. She thought she would get loads of money, and she actually loved Isaac. She hates everybody and everything, and she slashed the tires of a man's car just because his wife made a comment about the illegal drugs she takes. She has no qualms about teaming up with pedophiles, and would apparently watch a rape without blinking. When she got caught and restrained, she broke out and killed a cop without a second thought. She apparently has no Freudian Excuse for her behaviour, and it could be that she was always like this to begin with. Really, her death at Isaac's hands was no more than her well-deserved comeuppance.
- Did Not Do the Research - This overlaps with the below. Robb is pretty good about noting in the setting when laws were actually changed, such as gun laws, 'morality' laws, and so on. So it's quite glaring when Eve acts like she can take suspects to the precint without arresting them and 'charge them with Obstruction of Justice' if they don't come in or talk. None of which are actually viable in the United States. Sure, this could have changed as well, but unlike the others, there's no lampshade hanging of this. It reads more like Roberts has no clue about the law for arrests and questioning.
- Of course, this is also partly Truth in Television. A lot of police officers don't exactly care about the rule of law that much, and like to use charges such as "obstruction of justice" or "resisting arrest" as excuses to arrest whoever they'd like. (These charges have thus become known as "contempt of cop", meaning they're the excuse cops use to arrest you if they don't like you.) Eve normally isn't depicted as that sort of cop, but then again...
- Dystopia - Sure, the characters think it's okay, and there's all sorts of space travel and VR and autochefs yay. But then you actually start gathering stuff together. Like the fact that someone's taken white-out to the Bill of Rights. That real meat, coffee, tobacco, and other such things are so rare and expensive that some people go years without ever tasting them. That the environmental movement has grown so powerful that there are Green Cops who come around to hassle you if you're not being environmentally conscious enough. All your activities online are monitored at all times by the forces of CompuGuard. If Eve didn't rattle on about warrants and the "revised" Miranda (and get around the first half the time), you'd immediately start wondering if her world wasn't a low-level fascist state.
- Then, what's not a Dystopia borders on being a Mary Suetopia. Women are paid to be mothers if they choose to stay home with their children, and people can retire quite young (the book is vague... late fifties, sixty at the latest?) and live quite comfortable lives on their default retirement package... keep in mind people live well past 100 in the setting, so it's not all that unreasonable to think someone could live on their social security anywhere from two to four times as long as they worked. Where all the money for this comes from without taxes being so high that everyone just gets a living allowance from the government is never explained.
- Les Yay - Dallas and Peabody, but only for humor, as they are both straight and in committed relationships.
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Peabody (explaining her lateness): ..."Then I couldn't sleep because of the jitters, so I jumped McNab to sort of remind myself why I'm doing this..." —(Imitation In Death)
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- Mary Sue - Eve. Even if you don't agree that she is in execution, tell someone you know that you're reading a series about a female cop in the future who's pretty much the best police officer in the city, who constantly has bad guys work their entire plans around challenging themselves against her, and who is married to a drop-dead gorgeous guy who's the richest man in the universe. Watch them make the "Oh god what a Mary Sue" face.
- Jerk Sue - Eve is rude, confrontational, antisocial, and has rage issues. She admits to delighting in upsetting people and making them hurt or angry, and using her position to do so... of course, anyone who did the same thing to someone she cared about would be first on her Shit List. Threatening her friends and loved ones with bodily harm and humiliation is standard, and in-universe considered part of her charm. Any time she interacts with someone she knows well there's at least a fifty-fifty chance she's going to insult them deeply. And... well, honestly, this is longer than necessary already, you get the idea. With that said, New York To Dallas and stories after that have Eve beginning to realize that her Jerkass tendencies come from her biological mother, and that she may decide to tone them down a little, if only to act a little less like her mother.
- Mary Suetopia: Parts of New York come off as this. But that's got nothing on the parts of Dallas, Texas that Eve goes to in New York To Dallas. Those parts are so...perfect, sweet and squeaky-clean that Eve finds them a little creepy. It seems to serve the purpose of contrasting and highlighting just how vile, unnatural, monstrous, heinous, and disgusting Sylvia Prentiss and Isaac McQueen really are!
- Protagonist-Centered Morality - Some of the later books seem to have begun wandering into this area. The idea that justice may be more important than the law isn't too bad itself... but Eve always seems to be the judge of what's justice. Past book thirty or so, she goes from bending the law when it's absolutely necessary to breaking it at will. If she weren't generally presented as unfailingly right, it would almost look like a case of Jumping Off the Slippery Slope.
- Oh...let's be honest. This trope has been present since the very first book of this series. For Eve, Roarke is this trope. Vengeance In Death had Eve finding out about some very serious crimes, however justified, committed by her husband. She had to choose between the law or her husband. Take a wild guess on which one she picked. Then there was Creation In Death, which had Eve finding out from the killer that he prepared documents a long time ago that will legally allow him to commit suicide. She has Roarke erase the documents, and states quite clearly to him that she is crossing the line. Of course, the book demonstrated that the killer was a Complete Monster, so Eve's actions could be considered a Crowning Moment of Awesome and not a Moral Event Horizon. If it is any consolation, Eve discusses her actions with Roarke in Salvation In Death.
- Eve is a firm believer in the "Blue Wall", a firm dividing line between police and "civilians", and that police are both separate from and should be protected from the general populace. While she hates corrupt cops, she hates the people tasked with catching them just as much, and clearly believes she is separate from and superior to the general populace, to the point where during a period where she's stripped of her badge and faced with the potential of having to be a "civilian" she becomes borderline suicidal. Eve's mindset is basically the perfect one to breed an authoritarian monster, and it's only the author's assurances of her noble soul that keep her from being one.
- Purity Sue: Troy Trueheart is this, so very much! His purity had a Lampshade Hanging put onto it more than once. In fact, Portrait In Death had a guy murdering Purity Sues because he truly believed that by doing this, he would absorb the light of their pure souls into himself and never die, as well as show everyone else that they can avoid dying if they did this. Troy Trueheart almost ended up as one of his victims, in case you were wondering.
- Straw Man Has a Point - Generally every time someone talks about the constitutional right to own a gun. Characters who talk about how other people consider it a basic right were probably intended to come off in a tone of "How quaint", but... well, plenty of people do. It also sort of hurts the book's repeated statements that murders are very rare since guns were outlawed, since Eve has a long history of murder investigations under her belt... including multiple ones involving guns. (In fact, it's often mentioned how slammed the homicide division is and that Eve has an investigation backlog.) The book basically acknowledges, seemingly without meaning to, that all the revoking of the second amendment did was make guns exclusive to either the extremely rich or extremely criminal, and force everyone else to kill with methods such as knives and poison.
- The author later tries to address the earlier "oops" of guns being illegal but murder still happening constantly by having Eve protest that, among other things, it's completely eliminated school shootings. Apparently no one informed her that in reality, in countries where such laws already exist, there are still often school stabbings. The case is further undermined by Roberts' having Eve's enemies often armed with homemade blasters to ramp up the action... apparently you can make one of those with equipment from Radio Shack.
- One novel has another female character claim that Eve attempts to fit in with a male-dominated field by acting like a man and eschewing her femininity. This is presented in such a way that it's supposed to show the character as being shallow and arrogant, and simply using her sex appeal to get by. The thing is, she's right... Eve's desire to avoid anything "girly" often borders on obsession, and until several years into their marriage she freaks out at Roarke displaying affection for her in public for fear that someone she knows will see and think she's some weak emotional woman for kissing her husband.
- Squick - Eve and Roarke are examining the apartment of a sleazy murder victim (who they also discover to be a date rapist). In the process, Roarke remarks on (and handles) some vaguely defined but kinky sex toy. And then steals it, presumably to use on Eve later. Second hand sex toy, already very ew... second hand sex toy belonging to a rapist? Ugh.
- Values Dissonance - Eve values the law as preventing total chaos. Roarke goes around it if the law is sufficiently inconvenient. It's a pretty low bar. Eve has come to see his point, reluctantly.
- Roarke has come to see that Eve has a point, too.