Live Bait (EE) - Softcover

Tracy, P. J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141021535 ISBN 13: 9780141021539

Publisher: Penguin, 2005

Synopsis

When elderly Morey Gilbert is found, lying dead in the grass by his wife, Lily, it's a tragedy, but it shouldn't have been a shock - old people die. But when she finds a bullet hole in his skull, the blood washed away by heavy rain, sadness turns to fear. It looks like an execution ...

Soon a whole city is fearful as new victims are found, killed with the same cold precision. All elderly. All apparently blameless.

Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth, race to uncover a connection and their best hope of doing so may be Grace McBride, beautiful, damaged survivor of an earlier killing spree. And the answers, it seems, are buried in a terrible past.

Filled with the same crackling dialogue, pace and rich, vivid characters as the author's debut Want to Play?, PJ Tracy's Live Bait is an electrifying thriller that explores the chilling extremes of evil and retribution.

About this title

Review:

After a well-received debut novel the follow-up is always a mighty mountain to climb. Those who enjoyed the first book want the upward trajectory to be maintained, but we all fear a loss of momentum. PJ Tracy's Live Bait proves one thing conclusively: that the phenomenal Want to Play? was no fluke, and that in Tracy we have an American suspense writer with all the credentials to sit firmly in the upper echelons of top crime novelists.

That first book had critics rooting through their lexicons to come up with new ways of saying just how edge-of-the-seat it was, and if the new novel doesn't deliver quite the same levels of tension, that may be because Tracy has other fish to fry here than simply raising the pulse rate of the reader. Lily Gilbert stumbles across the body of her husband Morey in a field, shot through the brain, her grief is matched by shock at the execution-style death. Soon, other murders are happening with the same ruthless precision: old people are being dispatched in the same cool-headed fashion, and the victims appear to have led lives that hardly invited their violent ends. Assigned to solve the deaths are Detectives Rolseth and Magozzi, two very different individuals whose quirky method of working together produces only fitful success--until they light upon the attractive Grace McBride, who has managed to live through a previous bout of bloodletting. But can Grace lead the duo to the answers before more people die? And what are the consequences of delving into some very dark secrets?

If the slow-burn tension here is more tantalisingly handled than in the first book, that doesn't bespeak a faltering grip on Tracy's part: the agenda here is clearly the steady, methodical accruing of detail (in terms of both plot and characterisation) that pays handsome dividends, even if Tracy stretches our patience to audacious limits. Once again, we have the brilliantly observed character building and Hitchcockian assaults on the reader's sensibility. The suspense now is... can the third Tracy novel top its predecessors? --Barry Forshaw

Review:

Slick, enjoyable thriller. PJ Tracy is about to become a household name (Daily Mirror)

Her second offering doesn't disappoint. Vivid scenes, realistic characters and humorous dialogue (Time Out)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0141021535
• ISBN 13: 9780141021539
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464