Cold Comfort by Don Bredes

Cold Comfort, a novel by Don Bredes, published by Harmony Books, New York.  $22 in hard cover.

reviewed by Chris Braithwaite

The Northeast Kingdom is fertile territory for mystery.  It offers rugged scenery, remote mountains, tiny isolated villages, colorful characters who take a dubious view of the law and its minions, and plenty of unsolved murders.

Don Bredes has taken full advantage of the available ingredients and stewed up a fine mystery novel entitled Cold Comfort.

Its point of departure is the brutal, execution-style murder of Ronald and Maram Hanel in their Jay chalet in September 1984. 

Police never found a motive for the killings, and the case is still unsolved.

In Mr. Bredes' fictional treatment of the case, baffled State Police focus their investigation on the neighbor who discovers the bodies, Spud Preston.

It seems at first that this excitable dairy farmer is simply the victim of circumstance.  The police have to suspect somebody, and nobody else is available.  But Spud's behavior and a few tasty bits of gossip turn their fishing expedition into a serious investigation.

Enter our hero, Hector Bellevance.  He's Spud's half brother.  After a wrecked marriage and a ruined career as police detective, Hector has retreated to the home place and a career as a market gardener. 

Home is the village of Tipton, and it's at the bottom of a long economic decline. But, says Hector, "after a couple of reversals down around Boston, where I'd spent half my adult life, it was this Tipton, bypassed and forgotten, that I'd come back for."

As a crime solver, Hector is clearly burnt out.  But a tough detective named Evans is determined to pin the murders on Spud.

"I knew if I backed away now," Hector says, "not only would Evans and company focus their underfunded efforts on poor Spud until they broke him — one way or another — but the real killer's trail would fade to nothing.  I couldn't sit back and let that happen."

Mr. Bredes' hero is something of a throwback to the early masters of American detective fiction.  There's no egotism in him.  He's taken too many lumps for that.  Instead there's a large stubborn streak and a certain talent for blunt self-appraisal.

Early in the action, he gets a frank once-over from a couple of strippers from the club on the lake, imports from Montréal.  Hector offers the reader a brisk description of himself and adds this lovely line:  "Now and again I'll draw looks." 

He has an insider's cynical view of police procedure, and no deep personal problem with those who stray off the path of law and order.  Instead he is drawn into action by family loyalty and a strong sense of fair play. 

Cop or crook, real estate magnate or pornographer, people ought to be straight with each other.  And Hector's mission, not surprisingly, is to straighten them out.

He manages to enlist the help of a local newspaper reporter, a pretty woman whose personal history is as marked by disaster as his own.

Hector is not immediately overwhelmed.  "The allure of the woman was fading," he tells us. "She reminded me of how much I disliked the press, with its blithe sense of privilege and expectation."

But this odd couple digs deep into the quiet little society of Tipton, and comes up with a quite satisfactory list of surprises.

Mr. Bredes knows the territory well.  He came to the Northeast Kingdom straight out of college to teach English at Lake Region Union High School in 1969.

He wrote his first book, Hard Feelings, while waiting tables in Burlington in the early 1970s. 

The book was a success, and Mr. Bredes used the proceeds to build his house in Wheelock.  He has published a second novel, Muldoon, and written movie scripts with Jay Craven for adaptations of three of Howard Mosher's stories. 

When he's not writing, Mr. Bredes is an administrator in the external degree program of Johnson State College.

Local readers will recognize features the writer has plucked from here and there and moved up to his fictional village near the Canadian border — the P&H truck stop in Wells River, for example, and the real estate office in the covered bridge in Lyndonville.

Mr. Bredes has a gift for deft description.  Here, the police arrive at the crime scene:

"We caught the rush of tires on the gravel road below.  Down the view cut we saw two state police cruisers flicker past the roadside popples beyond the pond."

And out of one of those cruisers steps Evans, the troublesome trooper:

"He was a burly man, thick arms and shoulders, a good-sized gut, graying hair cut close, early forties, with small, shrewd hazel eyes turned up at the corners.  Knobby nose.  Big, square, clean-shaven jaw.  White cotton shirt open at the collar, no necktie, corduroy field jacket, black-and-silver running shoes."

Mr. Bredes clearly has a gift for the language, a strong sense of place, and a good story.  That adds up to a very good book, indeed.