Well as you can imagine, things in the house are still in a bit of turmoil. Unfortunately work seems to be getting in the way of finishing the unpacking of the all important books. I have however, at least found the box of unread books so I was quite excited by that! The one on the top of the box was by PJ Tracy which is a good a place to start as any.
Two Evils by PJ Tracy is the latest tail of Grace and the rest of the Monkeewrench group. When not creating state of the art computer games the team are found helping out detectives Gino and Magozzi. The story starts with Grace on a boat with her friend FBI agent John. He gets attacked and Grace has to kill two men to save his life. In order to find out who is after him, Grace calls on the skills of the Monkeewrench group. Meanwhile Gino and Magozzi are finding bodies including a young girl who was kidnapped along with other girls who survive, and 2 Somali men. The bodies are linked by a date on a calendar which they believe is going to be the date of a big terrorist attack.
I have read a number of PJ Tracy books and always enjoyed them, however unfortunately this was not one of my favourites. The story started well but at times it felt that there was too many plots to keep track of. As with all good mysteries you know that at some point the different strands will all come together, but I have to say it wasn’t as much of a page turner as some of the Mother and Daughter partnerships previous stuff. It was a story about terrorism and the ‘unseen’ threat of this which meant that the bad guys who were killed had no background or characterisation. I think that was probably why I wasn’t as keen on this as the previous novels as I prefer my villains to have more of a ‘face’.
The storylines do eventually merge but I actually felt that this was the point that the story became a bit silly. It was pretty clear who were the ringleaders and the whole finale just seemed a bit too much of an old fashioned western not the usual clever hi-tec end that you would expect from PJ Tracy.
Two evils can be read as a stand alone novel although I think that it would have been quite hard to understand what was going on at certain points for someone with no knowledge of the characters previous exploits or the reasons they act the way they do. I would say that this book is worth a read, and I suspect that its not the last we have heard from the new characters that are introduced, but I would make sure that you read the previous ones first.
A crime readers blog 