Customer Reviews

Out Cold: A Brady Coyne Novel

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I rated this book as a 4 star because I am such a huge fan of Tapply and his character Brady Coyne.

Had this been the very first Brady Coyne I had read, I would have rated a 3 stars. Why? Unfortunately, this one is very, very slow. While Tapply is not known for writing à la Patterson with car chases and extremely detailed accounts of the act of murder, he is ALWAYS capable of moving a storyline along at a good (great) pace. This book is the exception.

While I am eternally grateful that Tapply has made very little detailed references to fishing in this book, the storyline of Coyne accidentally finding the body of a murdered girl is his back yard just does not have the bite that his other storylines usually have.

Additionally, his intereaction with the people in his life such as Evie and Julie felt forced and almost like all the characters were not connecting.

I did not feel my usual investment in the storyline. While Coyne was his usual fun, interesting character, this book just felt slightly off for me. I did manage to finish it and I will absolutely continue reading this series - I just was not devouring this book as I usually would with the other ones.

However, because Tapply is such a strong author, I could not, in good conscience, rate him lower than a 4 star.

I too have read and usually enjoyed all of Tapply's books. I am very fond of his character Brady Coyne, but most of all I appreciate Tapply's use of the language. He tells a good story in such a way that I can easily SEE the action in my mind. This book held my attention as it moved right along; I couldn't put it down. I'm not sure I was reading the same book some of the other reviewers read. And BTW, there was nothing, neither pro nor con, concerning the legalization of abortion.

'm becoming very much of a Brady Coyne fan, but this installment in the series is disappointing.Before I go further, I do want to correct one reviewer's claim that this makes any statements on the abortion issue. It doesn't.Henry, Brady Coyne's dog, discovers a teenage girl's body in the snow in the lawyer's back yard. The girl's death was caused by a miscarriage, not by an illegal abortionist, so whatever your view on that issue, don't expect Tapply to make any comments, pro or con, on that issue.Anyway, Coyne feels increasingly responsible for the girl's death because his address is ound in the girl's possession and he feels if he had only known of her presence in his yard earlier, he might have saved her life. So he finds himself investigating the circumstances of her death and this leads to more deaths.The suspense is great during the first half, but be prepared for an ending which requires considerable suspenson of disbelief with the introduction of a character who would have been admirably portrayed by Boris Karloff id this had been a 1940's movie.I recommend this to staunch fans of the series, but if you're not dedicated to reading EVERY Brady Coyne novel, this is one I think you can safely skip.

Not one of Tappley's best. Starts very strong and there are some intriguing twists, but the resolution is far from satisfying and the ending quite abrupt.

I must add, as one other reviewer did, that this book has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH ABORTION. How anyone who actually read the book could come to that conclusion is beyond me.

I love the Brady Coyne novels (I've read them all) and think Tapply is a terrific writer. However, this book just isn't as good as usual. The magic is missing. It starts out kind of slowly, and although the pace picks up, the climax is over too quickly and seems almost comically far-fetched (to avoid giving away the ending, I won't say more).

I need to add that despite what reviewer Harriet Klausner wrote, this isn't any kind of "cautionary tale" and it absolutely does NOT warn "that abolishing legal abortion will drive it into the back alleys for the poor." The book has NOTHING to do with abortion. Once again that reviewer's credibility is called into question.

Attorney Brady Coyne's virtual spouse, Evie, is out of town so Brady and dog, Henry, are on their own. It's a snowy day when Henry brings Brady's attention to a person buried under the snow in their backyard. The young woman, discovered to have miscarried, dies and no one can identify her. Brady feels responsible and is determined to find out who she is and what happened. Others die and someone wants Brady to be one of the dead.

There are a lot of things I liked about this book and this series. The characters are great; from Brady to his more-than-just-a secretary July, to Evie, and on to Henry. The relationship with Evie is part of the character and the story but doesn't take away from the mystery; in fact, it is integral to the story. The dialogue is natural and I love the setting, although I kept wondering who Brady got from Boylston to Newbury without going on a cross street but that's being really picky. Tapply uses the setting well. I love that, although the protagonist is a lawyer, the book is not a legal thriller. There is good suspense, but motive that had me shaking my head and an ending that was so abrupt as to be startling. I criticize authors for not having tight stories, but I also don't want to feel as though the author was running out of pages so he just decided to end it now. So, while I enjoyed the book overall, I don't feel this is one of Tapply's best books.

After letting his dog, Henry, out for exercise in the back garden one wintry morning, Brady Coyne notices a lump he cannot identify. At first, he thinks it's a boy. But it turns out to be a teenaged girl with blue lips who has no pulse. The EMTs quickly arrive and head off with the girl. Brady calls a friend at the Beacon Hill police station who knows nothing and finds out that the girl had also been bleeding from a call that his assistant, Julie, makes in which she pretends to be a copy . . . a fact which Brady hadn't noticed. By the end of the day, Brady has had a visit from a Boston homicide detective, Saundra Mendoza, and is developing a bad case of the guilts. The young woman is unidentified, but she died from the combination of a miscarriage (Brady suspects an illegal abortion) and hypothermia. Her possessions contained a slip of paper with Brady's address.

Brady cannot leave it there and starts handing out color copies of the morgue shot of the young woman to homeless people. Over dinner at one of his old haunts, he picks up a homeless woman as a pro bono client who needs help with getting her kids back from foster homes. He gives her a copy of the photo as well.

Things seem to be at a standstill after he makes a few calls on the homeless woman's behalf . . . until she turns up dead in an alley with Brady's card in her pocket. Someone gouged out her throat with a broken bottle. Now, Brady's guilt index is off the scale. He starts interviewing street walkers to find if they can identify the girl. Along the way, he gets a glimpse of a strange guy in an old van with bears for a logo on it.

With more danger ahead, Brady plows on . . . ignoring requests from the police and his live-in girlfriend Evie (who's away on a business trip) to leave it alone. Before the story ends, Brady is on a one-man mission to find out what happened and to keep it from happening again.

This story is top-notch through about the first half of the book. The suspense is great. The character development is fine. You care about the characters. There's a lot of mystery and misdirection.

The story quickly falls apart after that. Most of the events that follow don't make much sense . . . even after you know what's been going on. In addition, the resolution makes you go back and question much of what happened in the first half of the book. It's as though the two parts of the book were written by two different people, who hadn't bothered to look at the other half of the book. In addition, much of the action remains unexplained . . . even after the book is over.

So although I graded this book as a three, it's more like a five for the first half on the first reading (which you will revise downward to 3-4 after finishing the book) and 1-2 for the second half.

Unless you are a devoted William Tapply fan, I suggest you skip this outing. There are many better offerings in this distinguished series.

Boston lawyer, Brady Coyne, wakes up one morning to find the body of a dead girl half-buried in the newly fallen snow in his backyard. Her identity is unknown, but in her pocket is Brady's address. Brady already feels guilty because as he lay sleeping in his warm bed, the girl lay bleeding to death from a miscarriage in his backyard. Brady needs answers to who the girl is and why she had his address in her pocket.

William Tappley is a fine storyteller, and I have enjoyed many of his Brady Coyne novels. In addition to the main mystery storyline, the on-going development of the characters and their relationships is a big part of the draw of the books for me. OUT COLD started off very promising. The first half of the book was suspensefully plotted. We come to care about the girl and her story. The second half started veering into too many tangents which really just seemed to muddy up the main storyline. Then unfortunately, the resolution of the story far-fetched that it ruined the whole book for me.

First half of book: 4 stars
Second half of book: 3 stars
Ending: 1 star

I checked out this book from my library's new acquisitions shelf, never having heard of Tapply. I liked the writing style and the characters, but the ending was less than satisfactory (as is the case with so many mysteries). Afterward I found out that my library has all of Tapply's Brady Coyne series books, written over the past couple of decades, and I have now read most of them. They are very good (almost all 4 stars) and I really enjoy escaping into Tapply's fictional Bostonian world. Brady Coyne is a lawyer of average intelligence whose clients prize his "discretion," and he usually solves the mysteries with a combination of stumbling persistence and luck. William Tapply, by the way, is the son of "Tap" Tapply who wrote the "Tap's Tips" column in _Field & Stream_ a long time ago, and a love of the outdoors runs through all of his books. I'll start reading his nonfiction works next.

one of the best Coyne books all of them are excellent couldnt put this one down. Fantastic