This book is good enough to put the "thrill" back in "thriller."

Nobody sets out to write a bad book, but talent tells.All writers try their best, every time out. It’s just that the old bell curve applies to writing as to everything else. Think of the world's remainder tables—indeed, the libraries—crammed with bad books.

Those who write well, write well. Even if they’re only writing mysteries. Or, worse yet, thrillers. Genre fiction has a bad rep because the demand is high and publishers will print just about anything that has a recognizable beginning, middle, and end.

Now and then, even in the gloppiest of genre fiction, real talent surfaces, takes the old, worn-out clichés and breathes new life into them.

Example in hand: Monkeewrench, by P.J. Tracy.

A thriller, a mystery with a lot of unlikelies going against it:

1. The first red flag is the author. P.J. Tracy is not one person but two. Name any writing "team" worth reading beyond page two and I’ll put you up for a week at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore.
2. Second red flag: Not only is P.J. Tracy a writing team, they are mother and daughter.
3. They chose to set their first fictional outing in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The thriller/mystery genre almost always requires an interesting, preferably exotic, setting. Minnesota? Wisconsin??
4. And plotwise, they divide they action up among a whole passel of good guys, which means there’s no single hero/heroine with whom the readers gets to identify from the git-go.

Forget all that. I’m here to tell you that Monkeewrench is one of the best reads of the year.

I don’t know how they did it, this family combo of P.J. Lambrecht and Traci Lambrecht writing as P.J. Tracy.

That’s not quite true. I know how they did it: talent.

But that’s like saying I know that gravity causes things to fall.

Whatever magic it is that enables a writers to get a character on paper and in a few words bring that character to life and make you care about what happens to him/her, P.J. Tracy has it. Bigtime.

She lays out a complex, double-pronged plot—half of which starts in the Wisconsin outback, the other half in Minneapolis—involving several dozen fascinating characters, ranging from a weird band of rich geeks to a bunch of law-enforcement types who run the gamut from lapsed Catholic to know-all Girl Friday.

With a deft hand she unfolds the story at exactly the right pace, dribbling out morsels of information to the reader (and the cops) in a seductive, tantalizing manner that only the true master of the genre can manage.

Add to this mix, red herrings galore, so that by the time you’re halfway through, you’re as puzzled as the cops though you’re pretty sure the killer is somewhere in sight.

Throw in dialog that runs from extremely cool to extremely funny (with never a wrong note struck), overlapping romantic interests (from heart-breaking to heart-healing), and enough local color to actually make you WANT to visit Minneapolis, and you’ve got one heck of a thriller.

You’ll notice I’m avoiding plot details. Simply because to even begin to describe the story would deprive you of the pleasure of letting P.J. Tracy tell it to you in her own masterful way.

Great literature? Probably not, because the genre does impose limits.