Cold Island by Peter Colt

This police procedural mystery features justice, as it should. Vengeance rears its ugly head briefly. And one could argue redemption is at least beginning. It’s an interesting read that features brutal crimes against children, small-town secrets, and self-admitting cliché cops.

Tommy Kelly is a homicide detective for the Massachusetts state police. Some bones of a child are uncovered on Nantucket Island, and he’s assigned to go and help the local police determine if the child was murdered. The book goes back and forth between 1981/82 and current times, divided by chapters. The original case this book centers around would also make a good book. Toward the end there is a lot of telling about how the town handled the case that could make a compelling book set at the time of the case.

For the first two-thirds of this book, I would have given it a rating of only three stars. It starts slow. The first fifty pages could have been condensed into ten pages. Throughout there is a lot of repetition. The characters rehash several times the same things. And for those writers out there, the author tells much of the story through dialog rather than showing the story by action.

The last fifty pages of this book moved the rating to a four-star book. Twists and turns. Secrets uncovered. Layers of mystery that I did not see. More astute readers may guess at some of it, but it’s well-disguised. You could also argue that the author is purposefully deceptive, but that didn’t bother me. The book is worth slogging through the first two-thirds to get to the last third. And the entire book is only 230 pages long.

There is fair amount of profanity. The only sex alluded to is off page. I do warn you that if you don’t like crimes against children, this is not a book you should read. It’s not overly graphic but still disturbing.

I will rank this one fifteenth of the books I’ve read so far this year. It’s a compelling story, just not presented in the way I would have written it. But that’s okay. You can be the judge for yourself.

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