Customer Reviews

The Ice Pick Artist: A Carl Wilcox Mystery (Carl Wilcox Mysteries)

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During the Depression, painter Carl Wilcox works at his family's Corden, South Dakota hotel because his father is ill. Three individuals, traveling separately, book rooms in the Wilcox Hotel. Lillybelle Fox is in Corden conducting research into the town's founders with an emphasis on Colonel Cutter. The next day, Lillybelle is found murdered and the other two guests (Murdoff and Olson) are gone.

Carl decides to investigate the killing by continuing Lillybelle's research in a hope that it will reveal a motive for murder. He quickly finds several people with an incentive for killing his guest and most of them start acting ugly towards the amateur sleuth. It seems that everyone has a secret, but especially wanting to keep quiet their clandestine past is a very powerful family with strong state-wide ties.

THE ICE PICK ARTIST is a superb historical regional mystery that brings to life the Depression in South Dakota. The who-done-it is fun and Carl is an intriguing character. Readers will taste the dust while driving all over the state in Carl's Model T. Harold Adams demonstrates why he is a Shamus Award winner with this tale that will have readers running to the used book stores for previous novels in the series.

Harriet Klausner

I am a big fan of the Carl Wilcox series and find them to be well written, interesting mysteries. In the case of "The Ice Pick Artist", I was diappointed. I found that the story went around in circles taking a great deal of time to arrive at the conclusion, which is odd for a relatively short book. Carl seems to be spinning his wheels and many of the characters are wooden. I guess it "can't be Nashville every night".

I'm not sure exacty what the author was trying to portray in this book. I didn't pick up on any particular train of thought where the protagonist, Carol Wilcox, was concerned. At one point, I almost lost track of the cast of characters, there were so many; and there didn't seem to be any real connection between this girl and Carl that would make him go traipsing all over the place trying to solve her murder. As for the murder storyline itself, it was somewhat adequate in keeping in line with the rest of the book. Nothing to write home about, that's for sure.

I felt that The Ice Pick Artist by Harold Adams was a major dissapointment. I felt their was a lack of characterization in the main character Carl Wilcox, we don't know what drives him to want to solve the murder of a young hotel visitor. I felt their were to many twists and turns in the story that it confused me as a reader. Adams also could have gone into more descriptive language concerning the setting of these small towns in the Midwest, as well as the characters in the book.