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What goes around comes around, but not always in the manner one expects. Justice Trip, a failed traveling salesman is a former high school classmate of the detective and is the kind of chronic loser who can collect real and imagined hurts and store them for a long time. He's also the kind of guy who can fantasize about making a big name for himself some day. When that happens, St Paul detective Paris Murphy has to wonder. Trip has twice found himself at the center of a search for a missing person. In one case a young girls is found safe and Trip attains celebrity status for a while. In the second, he stumbles over the severed finger of a missing bridesmaid. Small-town local authorities and citizenry are happy to give him credit, so much so that the investigation into the whereabouts of the missing woman is derailed. But big-city detective, Paris Murphy rides to the rescue, and there's a bit too much of that urban superiority at times. Still, the conflicts between jurisdictions, law-enforcement politicians and law-enforcement professionals is interesting and adds to the story. The novel has good pace, moments of tension and some really well-drawn if nasty characters. Trip's father and his home-care nurse are two who leap immediately to mind. Justice Trip himself is less compelling. Author Monsour's sense of place is well-presented and true, at least for this Midwesterner. The dialogue is generally good and evokes the kind of concerns often seen in small-town Minnesota. Overall, the book is a light, enjoyable read, although I wish it had had more careful editing and thoughtful consideration of the over-use of some unusual words and phrases. As in almost all crime fiction, there are times when the reader is pulled out of the story by an odd coincidence or questioning the reasoning power of a principal character, but such incidents are rare in COLD BLOOD, Monsour's second effort.
Reviewed by Carl Brookins, July 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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