Live Bait

P. J. Tracy

I picked up Live Bait and my worst fears were confirmed: the second book in Tracy's Monkeewrench series focuses not on the Monkeewrench gang themselves, but on Magozzi and Rolseth, the cops. However, my despair was swept away within a few pages; while Magozzi and Rolseth aren't quite the characters the Monkeewrench gang are (who do pop up, now and again, as fringe players), they and their colleagues in the homicide division make for a compelling enough story on their own.

Things have calmed down in St. Paul since the Monkeewrench murders, and there's a skeleton crew in the homicide division when things heat up again-- with three crime scenes in the same night. It doesn't take Magozzi, Rolseth, and their pals too long to figure out that these crime scenes are all connected-- and the connection goes from weird to unbelievable as the bodies pile up.

Like Monkeewrench before it, Live Bait is an easy-read thriller, empty calories to be gobbled up between heavier reads. Tracy (or The Tracies, as it were, P. J. Tracy being a mother-and-daughter team) conjures up wonderfully quirky characters and gives them real situations to deal with in ways that are sometimes entirely off the wall. It's your basic genre mystery, but it's good genre mystery, and well worth checking out if you're into that sort of thing.