I’ve gotten some pleasure from C. E. Nelson’s Trask Brothers novels, of which Bring Her Home is the third. The author seems to be trying to fill the gap left by John Sandford when he moved his Lucas Davenport character to a wider canvas than Minnesota. And he succeeds to some extent, especially in terms of cop banter (I love cop banter). The Trask Brothers, our heroes, are identical twins, one a county sheriff in northern Minnesota, the other an officer with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension based in Minneapolis. This adds the element of sibling rivalry to their banter, and that’s fun.
In Bring Her Home, the brothers have taken a week of common vacation leave for fishing, their favorite pastime. But it’s been raining all the time, and finally boredom drives them to the local police department to inquire about a missing person’s poster they’ve seen. The local chief is happy to have them review his files on the disappearance of a young woman three years ago. They don’t come up with any new ideas, but when a similar-looking young woman disappears up north, they start to suspect the two abductions might be connected. Don, the BCA brother, assigns a female officer to go north to look into things. After a while she becomes suspicious of a security officer at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.
Having given the Trask Brothers three books to win my favor, I have to say the weaknesses in the stories outweigh the virtues for me. The author isn’t a particularly good wordsmith, and makes a fair number of word mistakes – using “lead” for “led” and “dived” for “dove,” for instance. Also, there’s too much dependence on sheer good luck and coincidence to get main characters out of deadly danger – characters have a right to some luck, but you shouldn’t go to that well too often. I was slightly annoyed that a lot of the actual investigation in this book was delegated to a brand-new character – an improbably attractive female BCA agent whose presence I can only attribute to creative affirmative action. Also, I was supposed to believe that some highly placed people were covering up actual serial killings to avoid bad publicity. Few people have less respect for high officials in Minnesota than I do, but that strained my credibility. Also, the violence in this book was of a particularly distressing kind.
Some amusing banter doesn’t make up for all these weaknesses. I think I’m done with the Trask Brothers. Regretfully.
