This is a police procedural story which is set in St. Paul, Minnesota. It involves a case of the daylight kidnapping of two females. ( )

Interesting read, skimmed over about half the book because boring exposition, good detective work, good ending. ( )

This is just crap: totally disposable trash. We're in thrillers here, so nobody expects great literature - but there is such a thing as good bad art, whereas this ... ?!

I have to admit that I don't know if the characters are interesting, the action exciting, the denouement thrilling. Because when I read the following (at 1%) I junked the whole thing: "He rolled his athletic six-foot-one frame out of the Explorer. Ruggedly handsome, Mac had short blond hair, icy blue eyes, and a taut face with a dimple the size of the Grand Canyon on his scarred chin. A former captain of the University of Minnesota hockey team, he was still at his 190-pound playing weight and worked hard daily to keep it that way. Sliding on his Oakley sunglasses, ..."

I think this is what they mean when they call something 'beyond parody'.

No: life's just too short for this rubbish. ( )

Some good, some bad, and (you guessed it) some in between

Deadly Stillwater is the story of Detective Mac McRyan and the rest of the St. Paul Police Chief’s ‘boys’ and their efforts to solve a double kidnapping. Unfortunately, my review will be all over the map, as there are parts of this book that are extremely well done, parts that are mediocre, and parts that I simply did not care for.

The good news first. I found the suspense in this story to be outstanding. In part, this is due to the heinous nature of the crime. But even so, the author did an admirable job of keeping my stomach in a knot, as the finale approached relentlessly. The pacing was excellent. There are really no downtimes, although there is some seemingly unnecessary repetition of ideas.

In the so-so bucket, I would put character development. Many of the characters were largely stereotypes, making them and some of the dialog feel stale in places. But, the players were generally likable, if not all that real. Parts of the plot were also a bit high on the unbelievability scale, such as a programmer hacking multiple secure databases and creating complex data correlations on the fly. Consequently, I found myself thinking ‘yeah, right’ from time to time. But overall, the level of exaggeration was acceptable as a spice that complements the stew, rather than overpowering it.

The bad news, in my mind, was the concept of a hand-picked set of detectives, “the chief’s boys” as they were known, who worked outside the law. I’d like to say that this team of detectives was presented as antiheros, but the feel of the book was more in the vein of ‘the ends justify the means.’ While I have enjoyed some novels where the protagonist dispensed justice when he/she had no faith in the judicial system, the boys found the law too cumbersome during their investigations, i.e., do whatever’s necessary to find the bad guys. I have a hard time seeing this idea as heroic and this distaste tended to taint the story for me.

So, overall, if you are OK with a vigilante style of criminal investigation, Deadly Stillwater weaves a tense, well-paced yarn with somewhat stereotypic characters. ( )

It begins with an abduction and then the action never stops. Lots of twists and turns while racing the clock. Mac McRyan and the 'Boys' rarely stop while trying to solve the case. A suspenseful thriller where the end takes a 90 degree turn. ( )