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Summary
Summary
Minneapolis detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth are bored - ever since they solved the Monkeewrench case, the Twin Cities have been in a murder-free dry spell, as people no longer seem interested in killing one another. But with two brutal homicides taking place in one awful night, the crime drought ends - not with a trickle, but with an eventual torrent. Who would kill Morey Gilbert, a man without an enemy, a man who might as well have been a saint? His tiny, cranky little wife, Lily, is no help, and may even be a suspect; his estranged son, Jack, an infamous ambulance-chasing lawyer, has his own enemies; and his son-in-law, former cop Marty Pullman, is so depressed over his wife's death a year ago that he's ready to kill himself, but not Morey. The number of victims - all elderly - grows, and the city is fearful once again." The detectives' investigation threatens to uncover a series of horrendous secrets, some buried within the heart of the police department itself, blurring the lines between heroes and villains. Grace MacBride's cold-case-solving software may find the missing link - but at a terrible price.
Author Notes
P.J. Tracy is the pseudonym of mother-daughter writing duo P.J. and Traci Lambrecht, winners of the Anthony, Barry, Gumshoe, and Minnesota Book Awards. They write the Monkeewrench series, which includes Monkeewrench, Live Bait, Dead Run, Shoot to Thrill, The Sixth Idea, and Nothing Stays Buried.
P.J. Lambrecht started writing short stories for magazines in the early 1970s. Under the pen name Melinda Cross, she wrote 11 romance novels for Harlequin's Presents line. She also wrote two romance novels with her daughter. She died on December 21, 2016 at the age of 70.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The mother-daughter mystery writing team known as P.J. Tracy produces another winner with this follow-up to 2003's lively Monkeewrench. After several homicide-free months in their hometown of St. Paul, wisecracking police detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth are back in action when elderly-and much beloved-gardener Morey Gilbert is found face up near his greenhouse with a bullet hole in his head. At first, the prime murder suspects are family members: Gilbert's estranged son, Jack, a slick personal injury lawyer, and Gilbert's dry-eyed widow, Lily, who discovered the corpse-and moved it before the police arrived. When three more slayings follow, Magozzi and Rolseth discern disturbing common threads: each of the victims is over 80 and-except for Arlen Fisher, shot in the arm and dragged onto the train tracks to face his doom-Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Critical clues, including a gun traced to murders around the globe, surface as straitlaced detectives Aaron Langer and Johnny McLaren join the more offbeat Magozzi and Rolseth on the case. Tracy serves up punchy prose and quirky characters, from a sartorially challenged police chief to a plump, shrewd crime tech named Grimm. Romance for bachelor Magozzi arrives in the form of Grace MacBride, a comely computer whiz whose sophisticated software program, FLEE, has helped crack countless cases. The courtship moves slowly despite undeniable sparks; MacBride is still haunted by Monkeewrench-the deadly case that first brought the two together and continues to hover like a cloud of doom. With her stash of high-tech research tools, including special face recognition software, MacBride delivers revelations about both victims and perpetrator, leading Magozzi and Rolseth toward the case's spine-chilling resolution. With generous doses of humor and suspense, this sharp, satisfying thriller will rivet readers from the start. Agent, Ellen Geiger. Author tour. (May 3) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Forget Florida. Lose L.A. It's Minnesota that's heating up contemporary mysteries. Think William Kent Krueger and John Sandford, both of whom move their novels easily between the Twin Cities and the wild country to the north. Two more Minnesota crime writers, each with their second novels coming out, prove the cold front is no fluke. In Live Bait0 , the mother-daughter writing team that goes by the name P. J. Tracy concocts a police procedural that can be cherished for its dead-on cop humor and cop banter, as much as for the intricate plot. "Homicide is dead," laments a Minneapolis homicide detective: no bodies on the ground for months, only cold cases to keep the homicide guys busy. And then, a boon for Minneapolis detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth--two possible murders in one spring day. Both of the deceased are in their 80s; both live near each other. The cases are satisfyingly tricky. In the first, there is no crime scene, since the nongrieving widow dragged her husband from the outdoors into a greenhouse. In the second, there is a scene but no body--until one turns up tied to the railroad tracks. If a police procedural can be both disturbing and fun-filled, this is it. --Connie Fletcher Copyright 2004 Booklist
Kirkus Review
More serial-killing woes for Minneapolis Homicide's Det. Leo Magozzi and his ladylove Grace MacBride's software-development cohorts (Monkeewrench, 2003). Nursery owner Morey Gilbert is 84, watch repairman Arlen Fischer 89, widowed Rose Kleber a mere 78. Who's the murderer who can't wait for them to die of natural causes? And what kind of assassin shoots an old man like Fischer in the arm, improvises a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, carts him out of the house, and ties him to the railroad tracks with barbed wire? The answers, Magozzi's convinced, lie in connections among the victims only the Monkeewrench gang's new FLEE detective program can unearth. While he's waiting for FLEE to deliver the goods, Leo ponders why Morey Gilbert's son Jack, a sleazeball lawyer, wouldn't speak to his father, by all accounts the gentlest man in the world; how the murder last year of Morey's daughter figures into the present bloodbath; and what to make of the ballistics report that ties Fischer's murder to half a dozen unsolved homicides around the country. For the rest, Tracy returns in surprising detail to the idiosyncratic formula of her striking debut--Minneapolis cops and computer nerds battling the serial killer of a mysterious group of strangers--with more gravitas and more heartfelt revelations substituting for the wit, antic byplay, and originality of the prototype. If it's anything like Tracy's first two, Minnesotans may want to duck and cover before her third hits the bookshelves. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Fresh from Monkeewrench, Minneapolis detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth get to work as elderly murder victims start piling up. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 It was just after sunrise and still raining when Lily found her husband's body. He was lying faceup on the asphalt apron in front of the greenhouse, eyes and mouth open, collecting rainwater. Even dead, he looked quite handsome in this position, gravity pulling back the loose, wrinkled skin of his face, smoothing away eighty-four years of pain and smiles and worries. Lily stood over him for a moment, wincing when the raindrops plopped noisily onto his eyes. I hate eyedrops. Morey, hold still. Stop blinking. Stop blinking, she says, while she pours chemicals into my eyes. Hush. It's not chemicals. Natural tears, see? It says so right on the bottle. You expect a blind man to read? A little grain of sand in your eye and suddenly you're blind. Big tough guy. And they're not natural tears. What do they do? Go to funerals and hold little bottles under crying people? No, they mix chemicals together and call it natural tears. It's false advertising, is what it is. These are unnatural tears. A little bottle of lies. Shut up, old man. This is the thing, Lily. Nothing should pretend to be what it's not. Everything should have a big label that says what it is so there's no confusion. Like the fertilizer we used on the bedding plants that year that killed all our ladybugs, what was it called? Plant So Green. Right. So it should have been called Plant So Green Ladybug So Dead. Forget the tiny print on the back you can't read. Real truth in labeling, that's what we need. This is a good rule. God should follow such a rule. Morey! What can I say? He made a big mistake there. Would it have been such a problem for Him to make things look like what they are? I mean, He's God, right? This is something He could do. Think about it. You've got a guy at the door with this great smile and nice face and you let him in and he kills your whole family. This is God's mistake. Evil should look evil. Then you don't let it in. You, of all people, should know it's not that simple. It's exactly that simple. Lily took a breath, then sat on her heels-a young posture for such an old woman, but her knees were still good, still strong and flexible. She couldn't get Morey's eyes to close all the way, and with them open only a slit, he looked sinister. It was the first thing that had frightened Lily in a very long time. She wouldn't look at them as she pushed back the darkened silver hair the rain had plastered to his skull. One of her fingers slipped into a hole on the side of his head and she froze. "Oh, no," she whispered, then rose quickly, wiping her fingers on her overalls. "I told you so, Morey," she scolded her husband one last time. "I told you so." --From Live Bait by P. J. Tracy, copyright © 2004 Patricia Lambrecht and Traci Lambrecht, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher. Excerpted from Live Bait by P. J. Tracy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
