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SNOW CANDY
by Terry Carroll
The Mercury Press, November 2007
171 pages
$17.98 CAD
ISBN: 155128135X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Sergeant Carl North's New Year is not off to a good start. While other folk are warm a-bed, sleeping off the excesses of the holiday, he is standing in the snow at the site of a burned farmhouse that conceals a double homicide. When the pathologist makes the startling announcement that one of the bodies had been in a previous fire, North's thoughts turns to an arson blaze that had occurred elsewhere on the same night. Perhaps the Pythons, the biker gang that held the deed to the Saint Tease were determined to destroy evidence of the worst kind of crime - murder.

In this sequel to BODY CONTACT, North has separated from his wife Connie and moved from small town Belleford to St Thomas, Ontario, to accept a promotion and start life afresh. But his personal troubles take a back seat to the investigation, until his ex-wife is kidnapped by the Pythons as payback for disrupting their profitable 'business ventures'.

Despite having done his homework on preserving winter crime scenes (snow wax for tire impressions and LOTS of tarps for falling snow) and creating a very human police staff, Terry Carroll's writing is maddeningly uneven. The effect of the fine action sequences was dulled by poor grammar and awkward sentence structure - but those only occurred sporadically. It was as if Carroll's editor missed every fourth page. Perhaps the flow of the book would have been improved by including North's back story in the first part of the book instead of the last few chapters. I know that would have made me care more about Carl and his family.

All in all, SNOW CANDY is a well thought out police procedural and the pluses outweighed the negative elements. I became interested enough in the characters to search out BODY CONTACT and to look forward to more cases for Carl North.

Reviewed by Merrill Young, June 2008

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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