Live Bait (Monkeewrench Series #2)

by P. J. Tracy

Overview

Minneapolis detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth are bored - ever since they solved the Monkeewrench case, the Twin Cities have been in a murder-free dry spell, as people no longer seem interested in killing one another. But with two brutal homicides taking place in one awful night, the crime drought ends - not with a trickle, but with an eventual torrent. Who would kill Morey Gilbert, a man without an enemy, a man who might as well have been a saint? His tiny, cranky little wife, Lily, is no help, and may even be a suspect; his estranged son, Jack, an infamous ambulance-chasing lawyer, has his own enemies; and his son-in-law, former cop Marty Pullman, is so depressed over his wife's death a year ago that he's ready to kill himself, but not Morey. The number of victims - all elderly - grows, and the city is fearful once again." The detectives' investigation threatens to uncover a series of horrendous secrets, some buried within the heart of the police department itself, blurring the lines between hero's and villains. Grace MacBride's cold-case-solving software may find the missing link - but at a terrible price.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780451214638
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/05/2005
Series:	Monkeewrench Series , #2
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	484,860
Product dimensions:	4.21(w) x 6.72(h) x 1.08(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

P.J. Tracy is the pseudonym of mother-daughter writing duo P.J. and Traci Lambrecht, winners of the Anthony, Barry, Gumshoe, and Minnesota Book Awards. Their first four novels, Monkeewrench, Live Bait, Dead Run, and Snow Blind have become national and international bestsellers.

P.J. Lambrecht is a college dropout with one of the largest collections of sweatpants in the world. She was raised in an upper-middle class family of very nice people, and turned to writing to escape the hardships of such a life. She had her first short story published in The Saturday Evening Post when Traci was eight, still mercifully oblivious to her mother’s plans to eventually trick her into joining the family business. She has been a moderately successfully free-lance writer ever since, although she has absolutely no qualifications for such a profession, except a penchant for lying.

Traci Lambrecht spent most of her childhood riding and showing horses. She graduated with a Russian Studies major from St. Olaf College in Northfield Minnesota, where she also studied voice. Her aspirations of becoming a spy were dashed when the Cold War ended, so she instead attempted briefly and unsuccessfully to import Eastern European folk art. She began writing to finance her annoying habits of travel and singing in rock bands, and much to her mother’s relief, finally realized that the written word was her true calling. They have been writing together ever since.

Read an Excerpt

1

It was just after sunrise and still raining when Lily found her husband's body. He was lying faceup on the asphalt apron in front of the greenhouse, eyes and mouth open, collecting rainwater.

Even dead, he looked quite handsome in this position, gravity pulling back the loose, wrinkled skin of his face, smoothing away eighty-four years of pain and smiles and worries.

Lily stood over him for a moment, wincing when the raindrops plopped noisily onto his eyes.

I hate eyedrops.

Morey, hold still. Stop blinking.

Stop blinking, she says, while she pours chemicals into my eyes.

Hush. It's not chemicals. Natural tears, see? It says so right on the bottle.

You expect a blind man to read?

A little grain of sand in your eye and suddenly you're blind. Big tough guy.

And they're not natural tears. What do they do? Go to funerals and hold little bottles under crying people? No, they mix chemicals together and call it natural tears. It's false advertising, is what it is. These are unnatural tears. A little bottle of lies.

Shut up, old man.

This is the thing, Lily. Nothing should pretend to be what it's not. Everything should have a big label that says what it is so there's no confusion. Like the fertilizer we used on the bedding plants that year that killed all our ladybugs, what was it called?

Plant So Green.

Right. So it should have been called Plant So Green Ladybug So Dead. Forget the tiny print on the back you can't read. Real truth in labeling, that's what we need. This is a good rule. God should follow such a rule.

Morey!

What can I say? He made a big mistake there. Would it have been such a problem for Him to make things look like what they are? I mean, He's God, right? This is something He could do. Think about it. You've got a guy at the door with this great smile and nice face and you let him in and he kills your whole family. This is God's mistake. Evil should look evil. Then you don't let it in.

You, of all people, should know it's not that simple.

It's exactly that simple.

Lily took a breath, then sat on her heels-a young posture for such an old woman, but her knees were still good, still strong and flexible. She couldn't get Morey's eyes to close all the way, and with them open only a slit, he looked sinister. It was the first thing that had frightened Lily in a very long time. She wouldn't look at them as she pushed back the darkened silver hair the rain had plastered to his skull.

One of her fingers slipped into a hole on the side of his head and she froze. "Oh, no," she whispered, then rose quickly, wiping her fingers on her overalls.

"I told you so, Morey," she scolded her husband one last time. "I told you so."

—From Live Bait by P. J. Tracy, copyright © 2004 Patricia Lambrecht and Traci Lambrecht, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"[A] fast-paced and intriguingly plotted mystery."—Boston Globe

"Polished and intriguing...complex and interesting."—Chicago Sun-Times

Editorial Reviews

"[A] fast-paced and intriguingly plotted mystery."—Boston Globe

"Polished and intriguing...complex and interesting."—Chicago Sun-Times

From the Publisher

The Barnes & Noble Review
Having made a dazzling debut in 2003 with the crime thriller Monkeewrench, the mother-daughter writing team of P. J. Tracy follow up with another complex, compelling tale featuring an exciting blend of high-tech criminal profiling and old-fashioned dedicated police investigation.

Spring has come to Minneapolis, bringing with it an unseasonable heat wave…and a chilling end to the longest murder-free stretch the local homicide detectives have seen in years. Two old men died the same night. One was tied to train tracks and left to die. The other was shot in the head beside a greenhouse at the nursery he owned, his body left out in rain that washed the crime scene clean. Other than the fact that they lived in the same neighborhood, the victims had little in common. The first victim was an overweight watch repairman -- an apparent nobody whose elaborately engineered death seems to be the most remarkable thing about him. The second victim was not only well known; the elderly concentration camp survivor turned nursery owner seems to have been loved and admired by everyone -- except his only surviving child, a personal-injury attorney with a sleazy reputation. With such different means and styles of death, the police hesitate to connect the crimes. But both are undeniably high-profile cases that need to be closed quickly and cleanly, especially after two more elderly victims are added to the neighborhood death toll.

As detectives struggle to make sense of elusive and contradictory evidence, input from the computerized detective program that's the latest brainchild of the innovative software design company known as Monkeewrench -- and unexpected intelligence from Interpol -- expand their investigations in some remarkable directions…and the price of justice soars to unexpected heights. Sue Stone

bn.com

The mother-daughter mystery writing team known as P.J. Tracy produces another winner with this follow-up to 2003's lively Monkeewrench. After several homicide-free months in their hometown of St. Paul, wisecracking police detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth are back in action when elderly-and much beloved-gardener Morey Gilbert is found face up near his greenhouse with a bullet hole in his head. At first, the prime murder suspects are family members: Gilbert's estranged son, Jack, a slick personal injury lawyer, and Gilbert's dry-eyed widow, Lily, who discovered the corpse-and moved it before the police arrived. When three more slayings follow, Magozzi and Rolseth discern disturbing common threads: each of the victims is over 80 and-except for Arlen Fisher, shot in the arm and dragged onto the train tracks to face his doom-Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Critical clues, including a gun traced to murders around the globe, surface as straitlaced detectives Aaron Langer and Johnny McLaren join the more offbeat Magozzi and Rolseth on the case. Tracy serves up punchy prose and quirky characters, from a sartorially challenged police chief to a plump, shrewd crime tech named Grimm. Romance for bachelor Magozzi arrives in the form of Grace MacBride, a comely computer whiz whose sophisticated software program, FLEE, has helped crack countless cases. The courtship moves slowly despite undeniable sparks; MacBride is still haunted by Monkeewrench-the deadly case that first brought the two together and continues to hover like a cloud of doom. With her stash of high-tech research tools, including special face recognition software, MacBride delivers revelations about both victims and perpetrator, leading Magozzi and Rolseth toward the case's spine-chilling resolution. With generous doses of humor and suspense, this sharp, satisfying thriller will rivet readers from the start. Agent, Ellen Geiger. Author tour. (May 3) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Fresh from Monkeewrench, Minneapolis detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth get to work as elderly murder victims start piling up. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

More serial-killing woes for Minneapolis Homicide's Det. Leo Magozzi and his ladylove Grace MacBride's software-development cohorts (Monkeewrench, 2003). Nursery owner Morey Gilbert is 84, watch repairman Arlen Fischer 89, widowed Rose Kleber a mere 78. Who's the murderer who can't wait for them to die of natural causes? And what kind of assassin shoots an old man like Fischer in the arm, improvises a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, carts him out of the house, and ties him to the railroad tracks with barbed wire? The answers, Magozzi's convinced, lie in connections among the victims only the Monkeewrench gang's new FLEE detective program can unearth. While he's waiting for FLEE to deliver the goods, Leo ponders why Morey Gilbert's son Jack, a sleazeball lawyer, wouldn't speak to his father, by all accounts the gentlest man in the world; how the murder last year of Morey's daughter figures into the present bloodbath; and what to make of the ballistics report that ties Fischer's murder to half a dozen unsolved homicides around the country. For the rest, Tracy returns in surprising detail to the idiosyncratic formula of her striking debut-Minneapolis cops and computer nerds battling the serial killer of a mysterious group of strangers-with more gravitas and more heartfelt revelations substituting for the wit, antic byplay, and originality of the prototype. If it's anything like Tracy's first two, Minnesotans may want to duck and cover before her third hits the bookshelves. Agent: Bob Diforio/D4EO Literary Agency

Kirkus Reviews