Review: Excellent Follow-Up Novel!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 13, 2014
The Red Hot Fix is the second novel in the Justice Novel series by T.E. Woods but can be read as a stand-alone book. From the title, I thought the book was going to be another book about the Fixer. I was only partly correct. While the Fixer is in the book, the story is mainly about Detective Mort Grant’s next case.This time it seems he is after a prostitute who is killing her Johns, leaving them tied up, strangled, set on crushed mothballs with a red lipstick kiss on their foreheads. The press calls the killer “Trixie”.Mort has the help of his son Robbie on this case as his wife and twins have gone to France to visit her parents for a month. Robbie, an investigative journalist wrote a book about the Fixer killings which has done very well on the market. In reality, he and his wife are taking a break as they have hit a rocky patch in their marriage.Mort seeks the assistance of a local support group CLIP to learn more about prostitutes for his case, and gets assistance for some of his own personal issues as a by-product.  The case moves along well until there is a killing of a wealthy basketball team owner whose death was made to appear to look like a Trixie killing and Trixie starts to get personal with Detective Grant.I thought that the author did a nice job of continuing the character development of Mort and his son, as well as following up on the relationships of Mort and Lydia and the aftermath of the Fixer killings from Book 1. We continue to see the struggle that Lydia goes through as she deals with who she was and who she will become as she handles the situation with her friend/lover and the little girl from the library.There were enough twists and turns in this book to keep you guessing as to whom the murderer might be, and to wonder whether or not The Fixer has truly killed for the last time or will strike again. Can a serial killer stop killing? You’ll have to read the book to find out.I recommend this book to readers who enjoy mystery and suspense. I gave it a rating of 4 stars out of 5.Thank you to the publishers via NetGalley for providing a copy of the book in exchange for a fair and honest review. A positive opinion was not required. All thoughts are my own.This review was published on my blog Shelf Full of Books [...]