Ice Cold Heart by P.J. TracyMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Jacket blurb: On a bitterly cold winter night, Kelly Ramage leaves her suburban home, telling her husband she's going to meet a friend.
She never comes back.
When her body is discovered, murdered in what seems to be a sex game gone horribly wrong, Detectives Gino and Magozzi take the case, expecting to find a flirtatious trail leading straight to the killer.
However, Kelly's sinister lover has done a disturbingly good job of hiding his identity. This isn't his first victim - and that she won't be the last...
Read as an audio book.
It's been a few years since I've read a PJ Tracy book, and I just realized I completely skipped over book eight and nine. So...that says something about reading them in order. Helpful, but not necessary.
Book blurb doesn't really summarize the book adequately, offering only one plot teaser when there are two that drive the characters. There are a couple sub-plots, but those can be left for the reader to discover.
Minneapolis detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth pick up a murder case that at first appears to be a BDSM scene gone wrong. The more they investigate, the more they realize there's may be a connection to a murder in another state that's tied to a controversial art show.
Meanwhile, the Monkeewrench gang has been hired to revamp the cyber security of a bit-coin company that had millions stolen from their accounts. It's with great gusto that Harley and Roadrunner tackle this project, while Grace and Annie hold a supporting role. Roadrunner gets his moment in the limelight when he befriends a neighbor and her story becomes interlinked with theirs.
This was engaging for the most part, it kept my attention on my daily commute and when running errands. My main observation is there are a lot of moving pieces in this one and not infrequently I was sitting at a red light pondering who was being referenced and missing what ever was being said.
My main contention with the story stems from reading cozy mysteries, and the heroine goes to confront the protagonist by herself and ends up needing rescue. Major peeve.
This story should also have a trigger alert - there are scenes of sexual abuse and reference to sexual abuse with bondage.
Overall, it was an okay read. The plots were a bit grandiose and muddled from too many characters, and the book fell to an undesirable trope of damsel in distress. But it's Monkeewrench, and the Monkeewrench gang is enough to keep me reading.
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