Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: The Deepest Cut: A Monkeewrench Novel by P. J. Tracy

 

I was delighted to see another entry in the Monkeewrench series from P. J. Tracy in the NetGalley queue. P. J. Tracy was the pseudonym of mother and daughter writing duo P. J. and Traci Lambrecht. They created the Monkeewrench team, a group of crack cyber and software professionals in the Twin Cities. The first book in the series, Monkeewrench (Putnam, 2003), won the 2004 Anthony and 2004 Barry awards for best first novel. They wrote seven more books about the Monkeewrench gang and their growing involvement with the Minneapolis police before P. J.'s passing in December 2016. The series has won Anthony, Barry, Gumshoe, and Minnesota Book awards. I feared the 10^th title about the avant garde detectives, published in 2019, was the last. Since then Traci launched a new series set in Los Angles with LAPD Detective Margaret Nolan. But here we are and a new Monkeewrench adventure called The Deepest Cut (Crooked Lane Books, 2025) is set to be released in early September.

This latest title pulls in characters from #10, Ice Cold Heart (Crooked Lane Books, 2019), including Wolfgang Mauer, the adopted son of Rado, the psychopathic artist who was at the center of #10. Not surprisingly, Mauer has sizable issues of his own and has been sentenced to a maximum security mental hospital for multiple murders. He plots revenge against the law enforcement officers and the investigators who put him there and arranges to escape to execute his plans. The Monkeewrench squad and their Minnesota law enforcement friends are among his targets. He kidnaps a 10-year-old boy along his exit route, increasing the need to locate Mauer quickly. The Monkeewrench crew use their expertise to uncover the hidden stash of crypto funds that Mauer planned to fund his comfortable life in a country without a US extradition treaty.

Followers of the series will have no trouble sliding back into the Monkeewrench world with their over-the-top personalities and the complicated crimes they help investigate. This is not the place for new readers to start; fortunately the earlier books in the series are readily available. Recommended.

 

·         Publisher: ‎Crooked Lane Books

·         Publication date: ‎September 9, 2025

·         Language: ‎English

·         Print length: ‎288 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎1639108777

·         ISBN-13: ‎978-1639108770

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4fT6IUf

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2025

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.