As Minnesota gets hit with its first heavy snow of the year, things heat up for homicide detectives Magozzi and Rolseth when two cops are found frozen to death inside of snowmen. That’s a great, never-seen-that-before premise, and one that is carried through to full potential in P.J. Tracy’s SNOW BLIND, the fourth Monkeewrench mystery from the pseudonymous mother-daughter writing team of P.J. and Traci Lambrecht.
With the frenzy of media coverage, Magozzi and Rolseth fear copycat crimes. Soon enough, another mansicle surfaces in a neighboring county, one run by an inexperienced female sheriff on her first day on the job. But is this third instance a little too close to home to be entirely unrelated?
SNOW BLIND comes equipped with all the elements of a solid procedural whodunit: likable characters, an unusual crime, a slew of suspects and so many dangling threads you wonder how they’ll ever be tied together. But Tracy does, and it results in an ending that’s rather unconventional, and therefore gratifying. This time around, the Monkeewrench gang – those computer-game programmers who dabble in high-tech detective work – are mere secondary players, and you could almost excise them from the narrative entirely and lose nothing.
But the more quirky characters, the better, and by working them in, Tracy smartly builds on the wave established by their breakout debut, 2003′s MONKEEWRENCH. Even though I have not read any of the three novels that come before this, immersion was instant and inevitable, given the baffling mystery at hand and the pure comfort of the writing style. Weirder and smarter than I expected, SNOW BLIND is a can’t-miss read for this cruel summer, about a winter that’s even more so. –Rod Lott
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