Settings & Atmosphere - Fiction, Crimes - Fiction, Police Stories

Cold Comfort

Name: Cold Comfort
Author: Don Bredes
ISBN: 9780609606872

by Don Bredes

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Overview

Propelled by fine writing and full-blooded characters, Cold Comfort is an intricate tale of murder and passion set in a deceptively peaceful, rural American locale.

Hector Bellevance has returned to his hometown in northern Vermont after a bruising tenure as a Boston cop destroyed his marriage. Once there, he reluctantly accepts the mostly honorary title of town constable, a job that has him enforcing dog ordinances and other local nuisance laws, until a violent double-murder sets a destructive series of events in motion.

A wealthy and attractive couple from Canada, recent newcomers to the town, are found shot execution-style in their fashionable home. Hector's half-brother Spud -- a down-to-earth dairy farmer and neighbor of the two—finds the bodies shortly before the police discover that Spud and the wife were having an affair. With his brother tagged as suspect number one, Hector is forced to begin his own investigation into who wanted these people dead and why.

The search finds him keeping company with Wilma Strong-Parkhurst, a smart, sexy, outspoken reporter for the local paper, who knows more than she's telling. Together they uncover the unexpectedly dark underbelly of the town and its environs, which involves locally produced porn films, high-stakes real estate development, and drugs.

Critically acclaimed author Don Bredes spins a captivating story of lust, greed, and old-fashioned, time-honored American ingenuity.

About the Author, Don Bredes

DON BREDES is the author of two previous novels, Hard Feelings and Muldoon. He lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter.

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Editorials

Kirkus Reviews

Routine pastoral police procedural by Bredes (Muldoon, not reviewed, etc.) pits a homegrown cop against the usual suspects in a lonely northern Vermont border town. It's the fall foliage season, but Tipton village is hardly scenic for recently returned native son Hector Bellevance. Harvard grad Bellevance was a Boston police officer but quit after a shot he fired went wild and killed his partner; then he worked in a Cape Cod restaurant until his marriage to the owner ended in divorce. Now, living in the farmhouse he was raised in, Bellevance enforces building codes and chases down wild dogs as Tipton's only constable. Things get considerably more exciting when his philandering, ne'er-do-well half-brother, Preston"Spud" LaClaire, informs him that French-Canadian Otto Morganthau and his beautiful Lebanese wife, Gaea, have been horribly murdered in their vacation home. Bellevance quickly learns that Spud did more than merely blunder onto the reeking, week-old crime scene; he knew about the killing three days earlier and, worse yet, may have been sleeping with Gaea. While Bellevance has only jaundiced eyes for Spud, he knows his half-brother is no murderer and tries to keep pushy State Trooper Ed Evans from forcing an early confession. Bellevance's search for a murderer and a motive throws him into bed with conveniently divorced journalist Wilma Strong-Parkhurst. Together they uncover a variety of vermin related by blood, lust, or greed: a pornographer who makes sex films in a former girl's camp, a crazed militia leader, sleazy land speculators, corrupt cops, smugglers, and meddlesome French-Canadians. Prose as crisp as a New England morning—in a by-the-numbers tour ofVermont'sdarkside that fades against so much vivid local color.