Live Bait - Hardcover

Tracy, P. J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399151478 ISBN 13: 9780399151477

Publisher: Putnam Pub Group, 2004

Synopsis

Minneapolis detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth are confronted by a baffling new case, the murder of Morey Gilbert, the saintly elderly owner of a plant nursery, a homicide that is only the first in a series of killings of elderly victims, as the investigators once again draw on Grace MacBride's crime-solving software program to uncover a killer. 75,000 first printing.

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:

Get this book. It will not disappoint. ("Washington Times") [A] fast-paced and intriguingly plotted mystery. ("Boston Globe")

"[A] fast-paced and intriguingly plotted mystery."--Boston Globe

"Polished and intriguing...complex and interesting."--Chicago Sun-Times

-[A] fast-paced and intriguingly plotted mystery.---Boston Globe

-Polished and intriguing...complex and interesting.---Chicago Sun-Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Putnam Pub Group
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0399151478
• ISBN 13: 9780399151477
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320