Cold Comfort

i loved it thought it was great everyone should read it

Hector Bellevance, a former Boston cop, burnt-out, his marriage destroyed, moves back to his small, picturesque but stagnating Vermont hometown to take up truck farming and a quiet life. Except for the mistake of agreeing to be constable, a job more properly described as dog officer, he's doing fine. Until his neighbors, an affluent summer couple, get themselves murdered.Bredes' third novel gets off to a quick start and accelerates through events that threaten to destroy more than Bellevance's peace. Bluff and guarded but impulsive, Bellevance gets involved when the staties look likely to railroad his younger brother, who discovered the bodies - a day or two before he reported them.As he bulls and finesses his way into the investigation, Bellevance takes up with a pretty young reporter and together they begin uncovering a secret network of greed and drugs under the town's placid exterior.Breedes fleshes out his characters with hidden depths and unreliable surfaces. The normal pantheon of hardscrabble farmers and country people is augmented by the sorts that come to the country for its privacy, like survivalists and porn entrepreneurs. The plot is tight, the setting vivid and the hero is smarter than he is lucky.