Cold is a murder mystery novel, nominated for the North Star Book award, that focuses on teenagers Todd, who was murdered, and Georgia, who is trying to figure out what happened to Todd, even though she doesn’t know Todd. Todd’s dead body was discovered in the woods by the park, naked and frozen. Before the discovery, Todd’s ghost is awakened and gets attached to Detective Daniels and Greevey. When Georgia finds out about the murder, it continuously plagues her mind and she decides she must visit the park where Todd was found. Detectives Daniels and Greevey are in charge of Todd’s murder case. They stop by Todd’s old all-boys school but none of the other students would say much about him. The principal also didn’t have much information, although several students and the principal thought Todd had a rather odd relationship with a teacher named Mr. McVeeter. When looking through old files, they find out that Todd was part of a tutoring program with a couple of other kids but nobody wanted to participate. One of the students at Todd’s school in the program happened to be Georgia’s brother, Mark. Mark led her to believe he had never met Todd before but when she sees a picture of Todd, she realizes that Todd has been to her house before. As Georgia begins poking around into Todd’s murder, she begins snooping in Mark’s stuff where she finds several hundreds of dollars. Not knowing what to do and how this was connected to Todd, Georgia takes it and hides it in her locker at school. During the detectives’ investigation, the clues begin pointing more and more toward Mr. McVeeter as the murderer. Mr. McVeeter was gay, as was Todd, which explained his lack of friends. The clues suggested Mr. McVeeter had an inappropriate relationship with Todd, but is that the case?
Cold was a mediocre book. The real murderer ended up being very predictable. It didn’t actually feel like a mystery to me because I had already thought of who the murderer probably was. Also, several of Georgia’s parts felt irrelevant to the story. I didn’t gain anything by reading about her going through her daily life at school. It only felt like there were a couple parts of hers that pertained to the main story. The rest of her story felt like it should’ve been in a different book. She had a lot of self discoveries but they weren’t crucial to the storyline and discovering what truly happened to Todd. For Todd’s parts of the book, it felt more like it was about the detectives than it was about Todd. It didn’t look like we were finding out what had happened to Todd. Instead, it was just Todd recounting how his life used to be.
I would recommend this to people who are just dipping their toes into the murder mystery genre. There really isn’t anything gorey or graphic and it was a pretty mellow book. I would also recommend this to anyone who isn’t a fan of huge plot twists. As I previously mentioned, this was a fairly predictable book. Cold is also a good book for those looking for LGBTQ+ characters. There are quite a few in the story and both of the main characters are.
YA Murder Mystery enthusiasts may be disappointed by what Mariko Tamikai has to offer. While it is a murder mystery with good LGBTQ+ characters, it is not a very good murder mystery. It’s lacking the plot twists that are so evident in many murder mystery stories. But for those who are just getting into the genre, it’s probably a good book to start out with.