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Joe Talbert has his hands full. Not only is he carrying a full load of classes at the University of Minnesota and holding down multiple jobs, but he's also coping with an alcoholic mother and an autistic brother. Add to that a crippling sense of guilt, a potential new girlfriend, a 30-year-old mystery, and the deadly cold of a Minnesota winter, and you have the ingredients for a page-turning thriller.
Joe's initial involvement in the decades-old mystery comes through an English assignment. Joe chooses to write the biography of Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping, murdering, and burning a 14-year-old girl. But as Joe delves into Carl's life, he begins to question old truths - both Carl's and his own. With the help of his neighbor and eventual girlfriend Lila and his brother Jeremy, Joe does get the answers he's looking for, but not until both he and Lila face life-threatening - and life-changing - situations.
Throughout the book, Allen Eskens keeps the tension fairly high and increases it nicely toward the end as he takes the reader through one fast-paced crisis after another. But while the main focus of the book is Joe's amateur murder investigation and all its accompanying thrills, Eskens adds character depth by introducing several challenging family situations that Joe must also come to terms with. While some of those (and other) situations are just a bit too expected and some of the metaphors throughout the book are a little forced, overall Eskens delivers interesting puzzles, clever problem-solving, and plenty of stay-up-all-night-reading suspense.
§ Meredith Frazier, a writer with a background in English literature, lives in Dallas, Texas
Reviewed by Meredith Frazier, September 2014
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