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During the last few years there have been several family teams writing mystery and suspense novels under a pseudonym. Some of the best-known groups are the father and daughter team of ‘Michael Slade’ as well as the sister acts of ‘P.J. Parrish’ and ‘Perri O’Shaughnessy’. Now it is ‘P.J. Tracy’s’ turn, an American mother and daughter team living in the West Coast. Monkeewrench is their first collaboration and debut novel. The title of the book refers to the name of a successful computer game company founded by Grace McBride and four of her closest friends. They are best known for their children’s educational games but now they are planning on going main stream with a game for grown-ups. For the last several months they have been working on a game called SERIAL KILLER DETECTIVE (or SKUD for short) and have had great success beta testing the game on their website. The purpose of the game is to identify a serial killer in a fictional town of about 600 people. The player will look at ‘official’ police photos of staged murder scenes and gather clues from the pictures. If they collect the necessary clues and eliminate the right people out of the suspect list, the game will proceed to the next picture. There are about twenty murders in the game, but no one has even come close to finishing the game. There is a huge demand for the game and lots of pre-orders. Unfortunately, there is one major glitch regarding the game. The police have been investigating several murders that at first follow no pattern. The gamers watching the news realize that the murders are identical to the ones in the game. Once the police learn the connection and that the clues they left out in the press are present in the game. The police obviously suspect the Monkeewrench crew, but they come up with a roadblock. It appears that each one of the members took careful measures in erasing the past and reinventing themselves. They are all hiding something and have no desire to make their identities public. They will be forced to do their own investigation and see if the murders have anything to do with something that happened ten years ago. They hope not, but they can never be sure. They are hiding from something and they need to work fast before the police put the pieces of the puzzle together. P.J. Tracy goes over the top when writing this story. The main characters are all very colorful with some unusual quirks, strange dress codes, and some off the wall names. Who would have thought that Road Runner and Harley Davidson were not the real names of two of the main characters? There are a plethora of red herrings throughout the book that annoy more than anything else. The story’s conclusion is a bit anticlimactic because too much time is spent in explaining why the killer did what it did. It made sense but at the same time it did not make sense. As a first-time novel, the story is above average but worth notice. The book contains one of the most original serial killers whose identity is a crapshoot due to certain liberties the authors took with the character. The result was that it could be anyone and figuring it out was part the fun. The first book is good, but let see what comes in the near future. It will be at that point where we will see if this team has any staying power. Only time will tell.
Reviewed by Angel L. Soto, July 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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