Dead Run by P.J. Tracy (Monkeewrench #3)

Dead Run by P.J. Tracy


My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This one had me yelling at my windsheild. Repeatedly.  And venting to the husband as we walked, which ended up being more of a forced march as my blood pressure rose and I got agitated with it all.   Two strong books and then....lord knows what happened. Maybe the authors read W.K. Krueger's Mercy Falls and needed something outlandish too. I dunno.


I'll try and do this without major spoilers:


Govt conspiracy/major cover up in NE Wisconsin - so, a whole town vanishes and we have someone pushing a tanker truck into a lake. If you have ever been in NE Wisconsin farm country, you would know that - realistically - you will not be able to push a tanker truck into a lake and expect it to sink the prerequisite 18' to be totally submerged and not visible from the air. Your bulldozer/tractor would sink into the muck beyond it's axels and lord knows how'd you'd extract your tractor then. It would far, far, better to just put said ruined tanker truck on the back of a flatbed trailer and haul it out of there completely.


Ditto for a herd of dead cows. Plus they float once bloated. Not good to have a herd of bloated cows bobbing around a lake. Put in a dump truck, cover, and take to a secret government gravel pit and dump and cover.


You don't bury bodies under a feedlot paddock. Seriously. WTH.


Fed's/bad guys seemed really heavy handed. And stupid. See above comments.


All three ladies managed to leave their purses sitting on the counter at the diner for the bad guys to find later on? Riiighhht.... how convienent for the plot.


Didn't anyone think of sending a plane to fly over this fiasco when is started? Any law enforcement agency of a large mostly unpopulated area will have access to a small plane for surveilence. Use it!


Nobody noticed they couldn't raise their relatives on the phone? Only the local 'cake lady' was noticed to be missing? Sure, NE Wisconsin can be rather isolated, but come on! people would notice.


And can we get any more cliched with the nice hick cop with a head injury who feels compelled to "protect" three women who obviously know what the heck is going on moreso than he does? He deserved what happened to him.


Crikey, I could go on, but I will stop here. I felt this particular book, especially after reading the first two, just went winging right out into unbelievable land. Part of my issue was the main plot of three missing women running around a semi-secured government consipriacy zone was just so implausible. The secondary plot of trying to locate the missing women was more interesting. Still, the whole plot had me banging my head against my steering wheel. I 'read' this as an audiobook, by the way.


But, lest you wonder why I kept reading, it was because I loved the humor, I like the quirky characters, and because I wanted to find out how the romatic interests panned out at the end.




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