Review: ‘The Sixth Idea’

Not sure I'm on to something the rest of you aren't, but I'm here today to tell you about Monkeewrench just in case.

The mother-daughter writing team of Patricia Lambrecht and Track Lambrecht has been turning out Monkeewrench novels under the pseudonym P.J. Tracy since 2003 and has just published the seventh one, 'The Sixth Idea” (G.P. Putnam, $27, 306 pages).

The series is set in Minneapolis with the focus on two police detectives (Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth) and a group of quirky misfits who happen to be computer wizards. Grace MacBride, Annie Belinsky, Harley-Davidson and Roadrunner are the eccentric geniuses who operate a software company called Monkeewrench, which also devotes a great deal of resources to assisting law enforcement - most notably Magozzi and Rolseth).

'The Sixth Idea” is a fascinating account of people who all had connections with the men who worked on the first thermonuclear weapon - the hydrogen bomb.

Two of those people were to meet in Minneapolis to talk about that connection but were murdered hours before that scheduled meeting. A young woman was on a flight to Minneapolis with one of those men, discovered her own connection to the H-Bomb project and is soon in jeopardy. A terminally ill man is kidnapped, and an Alzheimer's patient goes missing. They are presumed dead or in danger.

Enter Magozzi and Rolseth, who soon tie together a bunch of seemingly unrelated deaths and disappearances and with the help of the Monkeewrench gang also discover that 'The Sixth Idea” arose out of that early bomb project and needs to be kept in the past. Things get extremely intense as the gang desperately tries to keep the possibility of a modern-day Armageddon at bay.

The Monkeewrench books are a delightful combination of dogged old-style police procedure and high-tech developments that propel that process along.

The novels are nicely plotted and long on storytelling but are largely character driven. They're best read in order because character development is such an integral part of understanding the engagements and interactions that drive the narrative.