The Coldest Blood
β Scribed by Jim Kelly
- Publisher
- Minotaur Books;Michael Joseph
- Year
- 2006;2007
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 202 KB
- Category
- Fiction
- ISBN
- 0312364784
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
β¦ Synopsis
From Publishers Weekly
Kelly's well-written if convoluted fourth outing for Cambridgeshire journalist Philip Dryden (after 2005's The Moon Tunnel) opens with a gruesome scene at the Dolphin Holiday Camp in August 1974, then shifts to a record-breaking cold snap 31 years later and a terminally ill man's murder. Dryden gets embroiled in the mystery by reporting on another death, that of landscape painter Declan McIlroy, ostensibly due to the cold. But the two corpses share a common past, and the search for the truth puts Dryden on the trail of a bizarre murder case dating back to that summer in 1974. Kelly's prose is insightful, but the complexities of his story can be confusing. Dryden's backstoryhis invalid wife, Laura, is recovering from a coma; refusing to drive himself, he relies on the delightfully quirky cabbie Humphmay be challenging for newcomers to decipher. (Jan.)
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Starred Review Cold permeates this tale: the actual cold snap that holds the English Fens in its grasp; the frozen state of "Locked-in Syndrome," which grips the hero's wife in a comalike state; and the hero's own iced-over hopes. The fact that the hero keeps struggling on makes this novel, like its predecessors in the series, as much a quest story as a mystery. Philip Dryden was formerly a thriving Fleet Street journalist, and his wife was a successful London actress. Both their lives have been on hold since the car accident six years before that left Dryden's wife in a peculiarly conscious/comatose state, necessitating a move to the cathedral city of Ely for its premier hospital. Dryden now works as a journalist for a much lesser paper, leaving him plenty of time to investigate fully any puzzles that come by way of his work, which happens when the city of Ely and the Fens are hit with a series of deaths seemingly related to the cold snap. Two of the victims are connected by the fact that they both recently filed abuse charges against an orphanage where they lived as children. Dryden explores whether these two plaintiffs may have been murdered. This is another winner in what has become one of the best British crime series on the market. Kelly should be read as much for his Dickensian atmosphere (his descriptions of the abandoned orphanage and the Victorian workhouse-turned-hospital are achingly bleak) and his full-throttle characterizations as for his masterful plotting. Connie Fletcher
Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
A man lies hidden in an abandoned boat. Stifling his own screams, he draws a knife across his arm, letting the blood flow free. Soon he'll be dead - and life can begin again. Three decades later, small-town newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is experiencing a cold, bitter Christmas on the Fens.
SUMMARY: A man lies hidden in an abandoned boat. Stifling his own screams, he draws a knife across his arm, letting the blood flow free. Soon heβll be dead β and life can begin again. Β Three decades later, small-town newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is experiencing a cold, bitter Christmas on the Fe
SUMMARY: A man lies hidden in an abandoned boat. Stifling his own screams, he draws a knife across his arm, letting the blood flow free. Soon hell be dead and life can begin again. Three decades later, small-town newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is experiencing a cold, bitter Christmas on the Fens
A man lies hidden in an abandoned boat. Stifling his own screams, he draws a knife across his arm, letting the blood flow free. Soon heβll be dead β and life can begin again. Three decades later, small-town newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is experiencing a cold, bitter Christmas on the Fens. Dryden