The View from Middle Spunk Creek

Cold Case

Just uttering the words gives me shivers. It means failure. It means a case hasn’t been cleared. It means there is a perpetrator of a crime loose in society. It means we are all less safe.

But recent advances in science and technology related to DNA identification, light spectrum analysis and other investigative techniques have opened up new possibilities for solving cold cases.

I spent an informative couple of hours with Zumbrota (Minnesota) police chief Pat Callahan recently, talking about cold cases, police procedures and technological advances. I learned that, on average, about 70-75% of all cases are “cleared”, meaning that they have been resolved in some fashion. It also means that 25-30% of all cases become “cold” when an investigation hits a dead end.

With the advanced techniques and technology, and the ever-growing expertise of law enforcement investigators, particularly those with the State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), the percentage of cold cases is beginning to shrink. To date, these advances have been applied primarily to homicides and other such heinous crimes, but cold case files are never discarded, and they are routinely revisited from time-to-time, reviewed for new developments and investigative advances that may be applicable to the facts of that particular case. According to Sheriff Callahan, in coming years these advances, and those still to come, could trickle down to even the coldest, most mundane cases.

Enter the world of The Sower, second book in The Chimera Chronicles. At the center of The Sower is a cold case, a five-year-old homicide that took place in the contented community of Zumbrota. A case which seeps into the highest echelons of national politics and threatens the very foundation of our electoral process.

Will new technology solve the case? Will the women of the Monet Detective Agency uncover evidence that local law enforcement and the BCA missed? Will the mystery of The Reaper be solved? Will the myth of the Chimera become reality?

Answers to these and many more questions will be found in The Sower, coming in time for Christmas, 2019.

Don’t forget to order your copy of The Reaper, prequel to The Sower, due to be released June 1, 2019. To pre-order, click on The Reaper tab in this website and scroll to the bottom of the page.