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It seems a fluke when Lydia Ascher sits next to man on a plane whose father worked on the same top-secret defense project as her grandfather, but when he anther person connected to that project are murdered, she realizes it may not be a coincidence at all.
In the seventh outing for the Monkeewrench team and Minneapolis detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth, the police are once again joining forces with a team of eccentric computer experts to solve a crime that is far from the run-of-the-mill murder. Someone seems to be targeting the descendants of scientists who, in the years following World War II, worked on the hydrogen bomb. It's hard to understand why. After all, it's been decades since the secrets of the bomb were uncovered and the cold war is long over. But readers know from the opening chapter that some secrets have remained hidden, including one called the Sixth Idea. Someone who is very good at escaping notice is using a hobby website one of the scientist's children started to target the descendants of those who worked on the project.
That targeting begins as Lydia Ascher boards a plane and chats with a sympathetic seatmate who tries to ease her nervousness. Her grandfather died when his plane exploded shortly after takeoff, and she's never been comfortable flying. As a distraction, her neighbor tells her heading to the the Twin Cities to meet with a man whose father worked with his on a secret military project during the cold war. As they chat, they realize they have something strange in common: her seatmate's father worked on the same top-secret project as her grandfather. Not long after she begins to wonder whether it was a coincidence at all when both men are killed on the same frigid December night.
For Magozzi and Gino Rolseth, it's just too unlikely that a man would be shot outside his hotel at about the same time the house of the person he was about to visit goes up in a gas explosion, particularly since the murderer at the hotel was too sophisticated to be a common mugger – and the body found in the burned-out house has a bullet in its skull. They turn to Monkeewrench, a firm of crafty cyber experts, to help recover video of one of the shootings and to look for information using The Beast, a complex program that can mine data and sort through it to find connections. They also quickly realize they need to protect Lydia, who's a target too. But the case gets even more complicated when an assassin sent to kill Lydia is shot dead on the scene. Who wants these people dead, and who is trying to prevent it? Whoever these players are, they're probably state agents. And they're extremely good at their jobs.
The mother and daughter team who write under the name P.J. Tracy, have written a thriller that offers an intriguing and timely possibility for mass mayhem wrapped up in a completely improbable scenario, one that readers will accept because they're having so much fun. The recurring characters and the new ones are well-developed and provide enough emotional involvement mixed with humor to anchor the action and keep the pages turning. While fans of the series will enjoy seeing the relationships among the familiar cast develop, starting at the beginning isn't required to step into a world where the men are funny, the women are strong, and the weather is worse than average.
§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, July 2016
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