Two Evils by P.J.Tracy

Two Evils is part of a serious of books featuring Grace McBride and her “gang” of computer hackers at monkeewrench.
Two men are found killed in their house, execution style, and the next morning another murder, this time of three men. However when the police start to investigate, it turns out that the men in question were hardly upstanding citizens. Local policemen Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth are drafted in to try and solve these murders, along with a murder of a 15 year old girl. Grace becomes involved after thwarting an assassination attempt on an FBI officer and the action culminates in a violent confrontation on an isolated Indian reservation.

Starting off with a mixture of characters and murders, it takes a while for the different storylines to start blending together. Once I had got into the book and started to make sense of all the plots, it did begin to move along nicely, and I particularly enjoyed the moral dilemma aspects to the storyline. As the book’s title suggests, sometimes it’s a case of picking the lesser of two evils.

On the whole it was an enjoyable crime novel, but I did find that I was missing something from not having read the previous books. Unlike other crime novels which feature the same characters, I found that not having read the previous books was a disadvantage. At the start of the book Grace is on a boat and is clearly upset about something, but this is never really discussed in depth, and the author assumes that the reader has read the previous novel and therefore knows what is going on. Obviously as a rule most people will have read the books in order and therefore this is not a massive criticism, but it does make the series stand out from others, which I have previously reviewed, where prior knowledge of the books and characters is not a requisite for reading the other books in a series. I would be interested in reading further books by PJ Tracy (the mother/daughter crime writing duo) but I think I will be starting at the beginning….