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It's a few days past New Year's, and those die-hard Minnesotans are finally happy. At long last, after an early winter that has threatened to damage their reputation for having the country's worst winters, Minneapolis is bracing itself for its first real blizzard. And this one's a doozy, too --- it'll drop close to three feet of ice and snow before it's over, leaving piles of the white stuff...and hiding more than one body.
Minneapolis Police Department homicide detective Gino Rolseth has been drafted to enter a snowman-building contest as part of the city's winter festival, coinciding happily with this new snowstorm. But children's happy laughs and shrieks turn to horrified screams when one child discovers a dead body packed inside one of the hundreds of snowpeople dotting the large city park.
Rolseth and his partner Leo Magozzi are soon on the trail of a killer (or killers?), a trail that will lead them 60 miles north of the Twin Cities on ice-packed roads to the rural county where a suspected killer is hell-bent on revenge. There they find another long-buried body, a brand new sheriff in way over her head, and a mysterious community united by their horrific pasts.
One of the greatest gifts possessed by the mother-daughter writing team known as P. J. Tracy is their ability to confer genuine character development both to a core group of recurring characters and to the new characters who might appear in just one book in the series. In SNOW BLIND, those who have read the three previous books in the Monkeewrench series will be pleased to find Rolseth and Magozzi, along with the wildly eccentric Monkeewrench team, back for this newest installment. Dundas County Sherriff Iris Rikker, contending with a murder during her very first day on the job, is also a fully drawn character, eager to test her police training without revealing her barely hidden vulnerabilities.
Tracy manages to impart this character development even in the midst of an engaging, elaborate plot that touches on several different jurisdictions, decades and even states. It also --- in a theme that I can't mention because it gives away part of the plot --- asks readers to consider the ethical implications of Rolseth and Magozzi's investigation, as well as of the crime that sparks it in the first place.
If you are a reader who likes crime novels with tidy plots and easily wrapped-up endings, then SNOW BLIND might not be for you. But if you enjoy a complex, creative, wisecracking mystery that touches on real-world concerns, then this will be the novel to send a chill down your spine even while you're sunning yourself at the beach.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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