“Everything changed today.”

Exacting justice outside the confines of the law can have cold and even deadly consequences.

At the Bloomington Police Department in Illinois, Senior Detective Sasha Frank and his partner, Detective Darcie Lyman, are tasked with investigating the brutal murder of Ashley Cummins in a location far from her family home in an upscale neighborhood. What was she doing there, and why did someone shoot her in the face?

In Cold Consequences by David Rohlfing, the reader knows more than the detectives but not everything, apparently. The detectives are under the gun to solve the case because Ashley was the only granddaughter of high-profile Judge Cummins, but the clues barely trickle in, and the suspect list is long and murky. While the reader might know who pulled the trigger and why, the reasons behind the deadly events that start brewing and popping after the initial crime remain a mystery. When that truth finally comes to light for the reader and eventually the detectives, the entire tone of the story eerily shifts from basic murder mystery destined to remain that way to one of personal vengeance and the emotional crumbling of a family mourning the loss of a young girl hooked on pain killers.

The author seamlessly incorporates the pitfalls and sad reality of opioid addiction and the ease in which anyone can become hooked and subsequently supplied, especially for those with unlimited funds. The main focus of the story is on the two detectives painstakingly scraping together the evidence in Ashley’s death and working toward the moment when the pieces fall into place and reveal the truth behind the firestorm of events set into motion following her murder. With multiple views, all might seem obvious to the reader, even as the detectives muddle through the clues, but the author still holds back some crucial information from everyone until just the right moment, expertly positioning a few explosive surprises toward the end that even the reader will not see coming.

Cold Consequences is the second book in the Detective Sasha Frank Mysteries, but it actually serves as a prequel to book one, Deliberate Duplicity, published in 2020. Both books can stand alone because while the well-developed main character stays the same, the plots are unrelated. Readers ready to dive into a sordid tale of murder, drugs, and vengeance will thoroughly enjoy the basic storyline of Cold Consequences that unexpectedly takes a calculating turn, keeping the reader from becoming too settled in a deceptively predictable plot.

Cold Consequences is actually a multi-layered mystery, and getting to the bottom of it all is entertaining and intriguing. As the body count soars, the author skillfully crafts a harrowing backdrop to the initial murder, with the lead detectives scrambling to root out the culprits and untangle the truth buried deep within a melancholy web of loss and emotionally charged decisions. The overall pacing oscillates between slow and fast, but the story never lags or becomes stagnant, even when the detectives hit roadblocks. When the epilogue rolls around, Sasha and Darcie are still unravelling the final threads of the mystery, and the story comes to a close on a note of expectation that Sasha Frank is not yet ready to hang up his detective hat, leaving the series open for the next book in the Detective Sasha Frank Mysteries.

Solving a crime that has too many suspects and not enough concrete evidence takes patience and astute questioning and observation, and with Senior Detective Sasha Frank on the case, the guilty party is no doubt doomed to eventually pay the piper and face the consequences.