The Coldest Blood [Hardcover]

Jim Kelly (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 9, 2007

A man lies hidden in an abandoned boat. Stifling his own screams, he draws a knife across his arm, letting the blood flow free. Soon he'll be dead - and life can begin again.
 
Three decades later, small-town newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is experiencing a cold, bitter Christmas on the Fens. Dryden's wife, Laura, is emerging from years in a coma, unsure if she wants to go on living. Meanwhile, people are freezing to death, among them Declan McIlroy, a 39 year old loner found dead in his flat with the windows thrown open. The police rule the death a suicide, but Dryden has his doubts - especially when he finds the body of Declan's best friend Joe frozen within a shell of ice on the doorstep of his secluded farmhouse.
 
At the same time, Dryden is investigating allegations of abuse laid against a Catholic orphanage - a touchy subject, due to his own Catholic upbringing. The incidents seem unrelated until Dryden discovers that Declan was one of the victims. Could his death have been part of a cover-up?
 
Soon, Dryden is picking his way along a disturbing trail of cruelty and betrayal to a brilliantly executed crime, and to a chilling, half-remembered mystery from his own childhood.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kelly's well-written if convoluted fourth outing for Cambridgeshire journalist Philip Dryden (after 2005's The Moon Tunnel) opens with a gruesome scene at the Dolphin Holiday Camp in August 1974, then shifts to a record-breaking cold snap 31 years later and a terminally ill man's murder. Dryden gets embroiled in the mystery by reporting on another death, that of landscape painter Declan McIlroy, ostensibly due to the cold. But the two corpses share a common past, and the search for the truth puts Dryden on the trail of a bizarre murder case dating back to that summer in 1974. Kelly's prose is insightful, but the complexities of his story can be confusing. Dryden's backstory—his invalid wife, Laura, is recovering from a coma; refusing to drive himself, he relies on the delightfully quirky cabbie Humph—may be challenging for newcomers to decipher. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Cold permeates this tale: the actual cold snap that holds the English Fens in its grasp; the frozen state of "Locked-in Syndrome," which grips the hero's wife in a comalike state; and the hero's own iced-over hopes. The fact that the hero keeps struggling on makes this novel, like its predecessors in the series, as much a quest story as a mystery. Philip Dryden was formerly a thriving Fleet Street journalist, and his wife was a successful London actress. Both their lives have been on hold since the car accident six years before that left Dryden's wife in a peculiarly conscious/comatose state, necessitating a move to the cathedral city of Ely for its premier hospital. Dryden now works as a journalist for a much lesser paper, leaving him plenty of time to investigate fully any puzzles that come by way of his work, which happens when the city of Ely and the Fens are hit with a series of deaths seemingly related to the cold snap. Two of the victims are connected by the fact that they both recently filed abuse charges against an orphanage where they lived as children. Dryden explores whether these two plaintiffs may have been murdered. This is another winner in what has become one of the best British crime series on the market. Kelly should be read as much for his Dickensian atmosphere (his descriptions of the abandoned orphanage and the Victorian workhouse-turned-hospital are achingly bleak) and his full-throttle characterizations as for his masterful plotting. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Minotaur Books; 1st edition (January 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312364784
• ISBN-13: 978-0312364786
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,781,495 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars great ending, December 14, 2007

By 

Elizabeth Slater (North Florida) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Coldest Blood (Hardcover)

This is the fourth book in Kelly's Phillip Dryden series, but it is the first I've read. Dryden is a reporter for a small-town paper where he lives on a boat while his wife is recuperating from an accident with a DUI. Life goes by slowly since his wife, Laura, has come out of her 4 year coma, and Dryden no longer drives. Ely, where he lives and works, is in the middle of the coldest weather in history and Dryden is working on a story on cold-weather fatalities and how to prevent them. When Dryden finds the body of one, iced over on the man's own front porch where he'd been locked out, he starts connecting dots that others don't see.


The story begins on a scene in 1974 at Dolphin Holiday Camp, and then quickly switches to present day Great Britain. This happens periodically throughout the story, although not enough to confuse the reader since the author gives minute hints to tie the two stories together. The reader then gets some background on Dryden's lonely life as a reporter, husband, and friend.

The initial investigation for Dryden is into the deaths caused by the cold front, but he quickly discovers that the two dead men were close friends and witnesses in a case of child abuse against a Catholic orphanage. He manages to engage the confidence of the only witness left - the priest who had been principal back then. It is all off the record, but it gives Dryden enough information to discover more mysterious paths in history that converge with the two dead men. The story has a gripping twist in it that isn't sudden, but enlightening, and helps lead the reader towards the culmination of the plot amidst the worst ice-storm on record.

Dryden is a likeable protagonist, and Humph, the cab driver, his quiet Watson-like foil. Dryden is following clues like a reporter would - albeit more like the reporter he used to be before the accident than he would for a small town weekly. The author is able to entwine the tales into a mystery with suspense that builds slowly, until the reader is reluctant to stop because of what might come next.

At first I wondered if I would like this book because it seemed to plod along and I didn't understand the background of the characters. However, the more I read the more I wanted to find out how it all tied together - or how it didn't. I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the ending - it's not something one could figure out by reading the last page!

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but not the best, March 4, 2009

By 

L. J. Roberts (Oakland, CA, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Coldest Blood (Hardcover)

First Sentence: The dagger lay on his naked thigh, its blade as cold as a rock-pool pebble.

Journalist Philip Dryden is researching two stories. A Catholic boy's orphanage is being investigated for severely beating those who were in its care. England is experiencing its coldest winter since 1947 and many are dying of hypothermia. One elderly man's is found frozen to death in his apartment, another by his front door. Dryden doesn't believe either was accidental as his history intersects with theirs.

I always have a bit of trouble getting into Kelly's books. It doesn't take long, however, before I am completely caught up in them.

He does character development well with his characters lives and behaviors reflecting the events of their pasts and present. With Dryden, in particular, and his wife Laura, a victim of Locked-In Syndrome, we see development in their characters.

It is the plot that is Kelly's particular strength. He is very good at building the story, bit-by-bit, drawing you in and building the suspense. For all that, this was not my favorite book in the series. The moving between two times was necessary but a bit confusing. And for all the importance of the weather, I never really felt it; it was visceral for me.

Still it was a good read. I shall continue with the series and hope the next book returns to his usual quality.

3.0 out of 5 stars The Coldest Blood, April 7, 2008

By 

The Bookie "Robin's song" (AZ) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Coldest Blood (Hardcover)

Mr. Dryden created an ice covered atmosphere. The plot was interesting, but I found the novel, just too long.