Reviews for Cold Pursuit

The average rating for Cold Pursuit based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-02-05 00:00:00 Justin Moe Although Cold Pursuit didn’t entirely convince me content wise, I remain a huge fan of Jefferson Parker. I’ve read four his books so far and he’s fast becoming another favorite of mine. I love detective stories with the emphasis on enigmatic and moody characters; in this case Tom McMichael is great (not too moody...). Loved those moments of self-reflection. And above all, I have a weak spot for great police procedurals. Here, in Cold Pursuit, millionaire Pete Braga has been found bludgeoned to death in his San Diego mansion. San Diego Homicide detective Tom McMichael is on the case. Too conveniently and too quickly evidence points in the direction of young nurse Sally Rainwater as a suspect. Furthermore the Irish McMichaels and the Portuguese Bragas share a violent history – fifty years ago Braga shot McMichael’s grandfather dead, then McMichael’s father (a teenager himself then) was accused of an attack that left Braga’s thirteen-year-old son brain-damaged. As I said, I didn’t entirely warm up to the plot. Maybe it was a bit over-plotted? Maybe because there was so much history of San Diego and its port and the world of fishery which was totally unfamiliar to me? I can’t put my finger on it. This case was complicated and there were actually two distinct crimes going on: One the murder of Pete Braga and, second, the traffic of freshly harvested kidneys over the Mexican border. For sure, Tom McMichael and his colleagues had a very hard time putting the pieces together, or rather separating the pieces. Truth be told, it felt rather realistic this slow pace of investigating. Real life is indeed much more complicated, confusing and messy than we normally read in novels.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-24 00:00:00 Will Wingerter "That night the wind came hard off the Pacific, an El Niño event that would blow three inches of rain onto the roofs of San Diego. It was the first big storm of the season, early January and overdue. Palm fronds lifted with a plastic hiss [...]" It's a cheap trick to use the first sentence of a novel for the epigraph, but it so happens that when I am writing this in late January the first storm of the season is blowing over half of inch of rain onto the roofs of my home town, San Diego. The novel begins when homicide detective Tommy McMichael has just received a phone call from his lieutenant that Pete Braga has been bludgeoned to death in his estate on the bay side of Point Loma. Mr. Braga had been a longtime fixture on the San Diego scene: a tuna fleet captain in the 1970s, then a Mercury dealer, then the mayor, the port commissioner, and one of the most famous San Diego city boosters. There happens to be a lot of dramatic history between the victim and Det. McMichael's family. In 1952, Mr. Braga had shot McMichael's grandfather, ostensibly in self-defense; he was not charged with the killing. Cold Pursuit (2003) is yet another novel by T. Jefferson Parker, that brings the works of Ross Macdonald, the quintessential California mystery writer, to the reader's mind. As in Macdonald's novels, the plot is composed of entangled threads of past and present; the main difference seems to be that Mr. Parker tends to be more explicit about the connections. In both authors' works the past and the present threads of the plot usually display an elegant symmetry. The victim's young and attractive nurse is the first suspect and the author offers the reader quite a subtle beginning of a romantic thread in the novel. Alas, a love scene later in the plot is written at the level much below the author's usual mastery of prose. On the other hand, I love the beginning of the ninth chapter: "'Psittacidae,' said Dr. Robert Eilerts, chief ornithologist for the San Diego ZOO." As usual in Mr. Parker's novels the complex plot abounds with political and business connections. To me, this is the main strength of this novel and most other works by the author. Mr. Parker, an ex-journalist, is very good at understanding and depicting the mechanisms of city and business politics. Accounts of the Port Commission's personnel politics, exposition of various issues related to planning the new airport and cargo terminal for San Diego and construction of an inland railroad through Imperial Valley provide fascinating reading. The presentation is so plausible that I had the feeling I was reading the metro and business pages of the San Diego Union Tribune, the main local paper. Unfortunately, as it very often happens with mystery/crime novels, even the ones written by a very good author like Mr. Parker, the ending is the weakest part. While the Tijuana bit is well written and interesting, we also have a cliché shootout and a cliché chase. One of the local sightseeing attractions is featured towards the end of the plot. No four-star rating even if this is a very good novel, well written, absorbing, and hugely realistic except for a few bits. Three-and-a-half stars.