Book Review: Nothing Stays Buried

NOTHING STAYS BURIED | P.J. Tracy
G.P. Putnam’s Sons | 08.01.2017
Rating: 4/5 stars

The Monkeewrench crew is back at it in the 8^th installment of this series! Centered around Minneapolis homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth, who have been sent to a crime scene in a heavily wooded park, where the scenario feels too familiar to be a coincidence. A playing card found on the victim’s body leads the detectives to think another case may be connected and that a serial killer is on the hunt. At the same time, Grace MacBride and the crew at Monkeewrench get a call from a sleepy town nearby concerning a missing woman and possible cartel connections.

The notion that goodness was punished was so pervasive that even the language was permeated with warnings. Only the good die young. Nice guys finish last. No good deed goes unpunished.

The Minneapolis detectives soon find their case tied to Monkeewrench’s investigation. With a violent criminal and cartel connections, the two groups are in for a wild, violent ride. The potential for this killer to be after the goal of completing an entire deck of murders, puts things in fast motion. Unlikely connections between the two cases weave the pieces of a puzzle filled with pure evil at its center. Can the detectives stop this killer before bodies pile up? What happened to this missing woman? Is she just another body in the deck?

This is the country – people stop to offer assistance when they see a car on the side of the road, because in Buttonwillow, Minnesota, everybody is your neighbor, even if you live twenty miles apart.

Before receiving access to this ARC, I had never read one of the Monkeewrench series books. Despite my lack of reading the seven previous releases, I was able to understand the connections between characters and the current plot line. There were certainly times where specific things were mentioned that I felt confused on from lacking the backstory, but these instances did not hinder my enjoyment of the novel. Tracy created a story that was both captivating and terrifying. The reality that events like these could easily happen in a small town made the story an addictive read. The character development was complete and the reader was able to truly bond with each character throughout the story. Not having read any of Tracy’s work in the past, I was not familiar with the way narratives switched between characters as the chapters changed. I was caught off guard initially by this formatting, but was able to pick up on the changes easier and adapt the further I read.

They weren’t cops, they weren’t detectives, they were just a motley collection of computer geniuses who’s developed crime-solving software that connected all the faded dots and made it easier for the cops to catch the bad guys.

NOTHING STAYS BURIED is a perfect novel for fans of the thriller genre who are intrigued by serial killers and scenarios that could happen to anyone. I would highly recommend picking this novel up regardless of if a reader has past experience with the Monkeewrench series or not. This book has been intrigued to head back and read the seven novels that came before in this series!

Thank you to G.P Putnam’s Sons and P.J. Tracy for providing me early access to this galley through Penguin’s First to Read program in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.