Monkeewrench

by P.J. Tracy

A mystery written by a mother/daughter team.  Ranging from Wisconsin to Minneapolis, police are stumped by two different sets of murders: an elderly couple found shot to death in their church and a serial killer copying a yet-to-be-released video game.  As the police race to find the killer before the next murder, they discover that the video-game creators have secrets of their own that may have come back to haunt them all.

This book has been riding around in the back of my van (or my "mobile library" as some like to call it) for a few months now.  It promised to be "Janet Evanovich meets Fargo", and anything claiming to be like Janet Evanovich will find its way into my hands eventually.  I actually did find this book good, though it was not what I expected.  There were some funny parts, but mostly it was a good old-fashioned mystery.  Just enough background on the main police characters to make them real people and just enough clues to make you think you have it all figured out.  And I did too - well, for the most part.  Like any good mystery, there's a twist.

There's another five "Monkeewrench" series books by this writing team and I'm reading the second one now.  (And this is where not having a library is going to be a pain in the butt, since I only have these two.)  I wasn't sure while reading "Monkeewrench" which characters will carry into subsequent books, since there were quite a few that seemed like they could be substantial enough to base a series on.