Melting Ice: The Cold Case File (Jim Lansing Vol. 2)

In this sequel to the first Jim Lansing Series novel, Chasing Smoke, Detective Lansing is again on the chase. The biggest problem he faces is that the suspect has a thirty-two year head start. As the title, Melting Ice, hints, this novel is about a cold case and Jim takes on the job at the request of his boss to which he is indebted and has a great deal of love and respect, Lt. Buck Jackson. It is the story of a beauty queen, whose unsolved murder was the first Buck had ever worked and has haunted him ever since. It is a story of echo victims, those relatives, friends and witnesses, even an old desert-rat, who have had their lives unalterably changed by the loss of a human being killed long before her time. Along with his ex-wife, Anne, an FBI trained human behavior analyst, Jim experiences the highs and lows of investigating the old murder, which Buck has all but begged him to solve before his impending retirement. DNA plays a huge role in the investigation of every cold case anymore, it seems. This case involves DNA also - and a pair of identical twins - as different as they are the same. It doesn’t help when DNA recovered from the scene doesn’t seem to support the belief that the victim had been a religious, chaste woman. None of the evidence seems to fit, and that includes DNA. The M.O. and ritual employed in this homicide and similar crimes identified during the investigation confuses Jim’s beautiful criminal profiler ex-wife, even though the DNA is a match. Or is it? Melting Ice is a wild ride, where DNA takes a back seat to “good old gumshoe police work” and offers an inside look at the politics, human error, interview and interrogation planning, preparation and orchestration, many times falling apart when answers don’t meet expectations. Laugh out loud, cry, get angry; become tangled in the net of guilt, shame and near failure as Jim and Annie work the biggest case of their lives and come to realize there are always ways to fix old mistakes and start anew.