Review: Cold Island (Detective Tommy Kelly #1) by Peter Colt

    

Print Length: 238 pages

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer (September 1, 2025)

From Goodreads.com:  When the remains of a young murder victim on Nantucket Island are discovered after thirty-five years, a detective begins to unearth the dark secrets of a community gone silent.

Massachusetts State Police detective Tommy Kelly is called to Nantucket Island, where a boy’s skeletal remains have been discovered at a construction site—interred for thirty-five years. The crime is especially gutting for Tommy, the father of two boys. It’s also the beginning of a grim mystery. Because no child during that period was even reported missing.

Tommy is partnered with Nantucket PD’s best detective, Jo Harris, who first chafes at the idea of a mainlander encroaching on her territory. And their work together is only raising more troubling questions. Then a possible link is found to the decades-old case of a serial killer—a vigilantly hidden part of the past that this tight-knit community would prefer to forget and never speak of again.

The secrets in their silence are so shocking they soon pull Tommy into a very dark place. Suddenly, offseason on Nantucket has never felt so cold, so isolating, or so dangerous.

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My Rating:  1 star out of 5

While the premise caught my attention instantly, this one just didn’t do it for me. The characters were painfully uninteresting and riddled with clichés. I mean, at this point, is there any police procedural novel that doesn’t have an alcoholic cop on the verge of divorce and/or a bitter ex-wife lurking in the background? Throw in the prickly local cop turned potential love interest, and just no, thank you.

Then there’s the writing itself. If I had to read the word “dick” one more time as shorthand for detective, I might’ve thrown the book across the room. Combine that with every mundane detail being described in exhausting depth (and I do mean EVERY detail; every turn he took, every building he passed, every pointless observation he had), it quickly became like trying to swim uphill through molasses. All that unnecessary detail only made the actual mistakes stand out even more, like when Detective Kelly somehow forgetting to get a DNA sample from a suspect.

By the time the big reveals and surprise twists rolled around, I was already checked out, and honestly, it was so laughably and unbelievably bad that it made the entire thing feel like a waste of time. And not even in a “so bad it’s entertaining” kind of way. Just… bad. And please don't bring up his hallucinations because, what?

DISCLAIMER: I received a complimentary copy of this novel from the publisher. This has not affected my review in any way. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are 100% my own.