Out Cold (Brady Coyne Mysteries) [Hardcover]

After letting his dog, Henry, out for exercise in the back garden one wintry morning, Brady Coyne notices a lump he cannot identify. At first, he thinks it's a boy. But it turns out to be a teenaged girl with blue lips who has no pulse. The EMTs quickly arrive and head off with the girl. Brady calls a friend at the Beacon Hill police station who knows nothing and finds out that the girl had also been bleeding from a call that his assistant, Julie, makes in which she pretends to be a copy . . . a fact which Brady hadn't noticed. By the end of the day, Brady has had a visit from a Boston homicide detective, Saundra Mendoza, and is developing a bad case of the guilts. The young woman is unidentified, but she died from the combination of a miscarriage (Brady suspects an illegal abortion) and hypothermia. Her possessions contained a slip of paper with Brady's address.

Brady cannot leave it there and starts handing out color copies of the morgue shot of the young woman to homeless people. Over dinner at one of his old haunts, he picks up a homeless woman as a pro bono client who needs help with getting her kids back from foster homes. He gives her a copy of the photo as well.

Things seem to be at a standstill after he makes a few calls on the homeless woman's behalf . . . until she turns up dead in an alley with Brady's card in her pocket. Someone gouged out her throat with a broken bottle. Now, Brady's guilt index is off the scale. He starts interviewing street walkers to find if they can identify the girl. Along the way, he gets a glimpse of a strange guy in an old van with bears for a logo on it.

With more danger ahead, Brady plows on . . . ignoring requests from the police and his live-in girlfriend Evie (who's away on a business trip) to leave it alone. Before the story ends, Brady is on a one-man mission to find out what happened and to keep it from happening again.

This story is top-notch through about the first half of the book. The suspense is great. The character development is fine. You care about the characters. There's a lot of mystery and misdirection.

The story quickly falls apart after that. Most of the events that follow don't make much sense . . . even after you know what's been going on. In addition, the resolution makes you go back and question much of what happened in the first half of the book. It's as though the two parts of the book were written by two different people, who hadn't bothered to look at the other half of the book. In addition, much of the action remains unexplained . . . even after the book is over.

So although I graded this book as a three, it's more like a five for the first half on the first reading (which you will revise downward to 3-4 after finishing the book) and 1-2 for the second half.

Unless you are a devoted William Tapply fan, I suggest you skip this outing. There are many better offerings in this distinguished series.