Cold Comfort [Hardcover]

Don Bredes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 27, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Penzler Pick, May 2001: Set in the small village of Tipton, bordering Quebec, Cold Comfort is a brooding tale of murder in a small town. Once a bustling community, Tipton, like many American towns, started dying when the interstate was built, funneling away the through-town traffic. It is to this town, his boyhood home, that Hector Bellevance returns from Boston, where he was a cop.

Heck, as he is known, is now the town constable and most of his duties are light, but on this particular day he is called out to a gruesome murder scene by his half brother, Spud, who found the bodies. Otto and Gaea Morgenthau were pleasant people who moved to the town several years ago but kept to themselves. The crime scene makes it clear that the couple had been dead for a while and suggests that they knew their attacker. When the state troopers arrive on the scene, the sergeant is particularly interested to know why Spud was at the house and why Heck has sent him home to finish his chores.

Until that moment, Heck has had no reason to believe that Spud was involved, but when he learns that Spud had discovered the bodies a day or two before telling him and that Spud has been seen peeking into the Morgenthau's windows, he knows he will have a tough time proving his brother was not involved in the murder. The best way to do that, of course, is to find out who did butcher the couple, which will mean uncovering some of the town's best kept secrets.

This is suspense at its well-written best. --Otto Penzler

From Publishers Weekly

In an attempt to leave his past behind--especially his heartbreaking failure as a Boston cop--Hector Bellevance has returned to the bucolic former logging town of Tipton, Vt., to farm vegetables, enforce canine ordinances and serve court papers as the village constable as this top-drawer literary crime novel begins. But Hector's plans for a peaceful life change when his half-brother Spud LaClair, a dairy farmer, calls to report a grisly find: the machine-gunned bodies of Hector's quiet, wealthy neighbors, Otto and Gaea Morganthau. A sharp, inventive and evocative storyteller, Bredes (Hard Feelings; Muldoon) expertly ties the crime to nearly every oddball in Hector's mountainside vicinity. The plot twists kick in when tenacious state police investigator Ed Evans arrives to question Hector, uncovering his unhappily married brother's lurid affair with Gaea and the fact that Spud had actually found the couple's bodies three days earlier. With the aid of local reporter Wilma Strong-Parkhurst, Hector begins a desperate campaign to solve the mystery and clear his brother, whom he believes incapable of jealous rage or murder. While Evans and police Lt. Brian Cahoon pursue the sex-crime angle, Hector begins to flesh out his theory when he discovers shady land dealings and estate problems connecting the Morganthaus to local strip-club owner and pornographer Keith Quimby. As state police close in on Spud, Hector and Wilma continue gathering clues in an attempt to unravel the conspiracy, which includes an elaborate money-laundering scheme and a drug-smuggling ring. Although the crowded plot's reach extends beyond its grasp, Bredes's passionate and grimly funny characters make this explosive, macabre tale worthwhile.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harmony; 1st edition (February 27, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609606875
• ISBN-13: 978-0609606872
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #181,605 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

DON BREDES lives high in the hills of northern Vermont. He is a novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and teacher.

He was born in New York City and educated at Syracuse University, the University of California, Irvine, where he was awarded an MFA in Fiction, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He has published five novels, HARD FEELINGS (Atheneum, 1977), MULDOON (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), and his Hector Bellevance literary suspense trilogy, COLD COMFORT (Harmony Books, 2001), THE FIFTH SEASON (Three Rivers Press, 2005), and THE ERRAND BOY (Three Rivers Press, 2009). He has also published numerous short stories and essays.

Don Bredes's HARD FEELINGS was a 20th Century-Fox film release in 1982. The American Library Association selected HARD FEELINGS as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year for Young Adults in 1977. HARD FEELINGS was also included in the New York Times list of notable books.

His feature film adaptation of Howard Frank Mosher's novella, WHERE THE RIVERS FLOW NORTH, starring Rip Torn and Michael J. Fox, received an National Endowment of the Arts grant in 1991 and has appeared on screens in theaters across North America, Europe, and Asia.

www.donbredes.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The dark side of small town Vermont, May 16, 2001

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cold Comfort (Hardcover)

Hector Bellevance, a former Boston cop, burnt-out, his marriage destroyed, moves back to his small, picturesque but stagnating Vermont hometown to take up truck farming and a quiet life. Except for the mistake of agreeing to be constable, a job more properly described as dog officer, he's doing fine. Until his neighbors, an affluent summer couple, get themselves murdered.

Bredes' third novel gets off to a quick start and accelerates through events that threaten to destroy more than Bellevance's peace. Bluff and guarded but impulsive, Bellevance gets involved when the staties look likely to railroad his younger brother, who discovered the bodies - a day or two before he reported them.

As he bulls and finesses his way into the investigation, Bellevance takes up with a pretty young reporter and together they begin uncovering a secret network of greed and drugs under the town's placid exterior.

Breedes fleshes out his characters with hidden depths and unreliable surfaces. The normal pantheon of hardscrabble farmers and country people is augmented by the sorts that come to the country for its privacy, like survivalists and porn entrepreneurs. The plot is tight, the setting vivid and the hero is smarter than he is lucky.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A quality novel of literary suspense, September 9, 2009

By 

Don Bredes (Danville, Vermont United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cold Comfort (Hardcover)

...from [...]:

Don Bredes is not exactly a household name right now, a situation that is somewhat puzzling to me, and one that I would hope to be temporary. COLD COMFORT is his third novel, so he's not exactly flooding the market with quantity, choosing instead to raise the tide with quality. And COLD COMFORT does just that.

COLD COMFORT, from its opening paragraph to its last pages, reminds me of THE LAST GOOD KISS by James Crumley. That is not to say that COLD COMFORT is a slavish imitation, or tribute, or pastiche, or whatever, of Crumley's masterpiece. No, it is none of those. It is similar in the sense that it places Hector Bellevance, its troubled protagonist, in a seldom visited setting --- northern Vermont, in this case --- to tread quietly but patiently through a forest full of lies to an uneasy conclusion, all the while keeping the reader fascinated.

Bellevance is an ex-cop and ex-husband who moves his shattered life from Boston to Tipton, his northern Vermont hometown, where he ekes out a quiet, small town existence raising vegetables on property he inherited from his mother. He is offered the vacant position of town constable, which he accepts with considerable reluctance, though the title is little more than ceremonial and involves haphazard enforcement of local nuisance laws. All of that changes dramatically when a transplanted Canadian couple living just down the street from him are brutally murdered. Spud, a somewhat simple but personally complicated potato farmer and Bellevance's half-brother, discovers the bodies under somewhat suspicious circumstances and becomes the primary suspect when it is discovered that he has lied about these circumstances and his involvement with one of the victims.

Bellevance, motivated as much by his sense of duty to his brother as to his gut feeling that Spud, in Bellevance's words, "just doesn't have it in him," begins his own investigation. Bellevance soon finds that he has few friends when he begins exposing the dark side of his small town to sunlight. Everyone, it seems, has secrets, and everyone --- from Spud to members of the state police --- is lying. Bellevance's most difficult problem, besides ascertaining who killed the victims, is why.

Bredes hopefully has many more books left to write. This reader, for one, wouldn't mind at all if he took us back to Tipton for another visit with Hector Bellevance.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub


(c) Copyright 2001, [...]. All rights reserved.

5.0 out of 5 stars A new author for my list of favorites, October 10, 2010

By 

David Wilson (Orange County, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cold Comfort (Hardcover)

Don Bredes has now written three novels around the character of Hector Bellevance set in the acutely observed environment of northern Vermont -- this one, "The Fifth Season," and "The Errand Boy." All are excellent, and I recommend them highly. Characters are well defined and interesting, the Vermont environment is fully integrated into the story, the process of observation, deduction and revelation should satisfy the most demanding reader of police procedurals. It is not necessary to read the books in order, but if you do you will see the Bellevance character develop subtleties of character that increase his appeal as a series lead. If you want to sample the author, start with "The Errand Boy," the most recent and in some ways the best of the series. You will almost certainly want to pick up the other two after you finish it.

"Cold Comfort" is a sometimes grim and wintry reading experience. I am sorry the one-star reviewer was so put off by the book, but I think the majority opinion on this novel and the author's other Bellevance books are a more reliable indicator of what most readers will find.