USA Today bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith takes you into the world of his acclaimed novel Dead Money with a new series about a group of retired Las Vegas Police detectives playing poker and solving cold cases.Retired Detective Bayard Lott hosts the weekly poker games at his home. The group calls themselves the Cold Poker Gang. And they succeed at closing old cases.Lott’s very first homicide … first homicide case as a brand-new detective had gone cold more than twenty years earlier. But retired Reno detective Julia Rogers, new to the Cold Poker Gang, suggests they look at that case again for personal reasons.
From that simple suggestion spins one of the strangest and most complicated murder mystery puzzles the gang has ever seen.
Read the whole riveting series!
Cold Call
Calling Dead
Bad Beat
Dead Hand
Freezeout
Ace High
Burn Card
“Dean Wesley Smith does for poker what James Patterson does for serial killers.”
—Sheldon McArthur, former owner of Mysterious Books in Los Angeles
“[An] exhilarating political poker thriller.”
—Genre Go Round Reviews on Dead Money
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Several Police Detectives who play an interesting game of Cold Poker take on a cold case for the Police Dept. The one who the story is about is the cold case of Julia Rogers ext. husband. Can’t stop reading!!!
it ia good
Quick read with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing until the end
I absolutely enjoyed this book. Interesting from start to finish.
Amazing book loved it
Everything comes together too easily without any real excitement or suspense.
Great book. Easy reading. Couldn’t wait to find out how it ended…
it was so good i wan to read more is there a second one.
Enjoyed the characters.
Bleh. Dire need of an editor’s red pen.
You don’t read Dean Wesley Smith for his ability to use the perfect word. Nor do you expect him to carefully edit his work to eliminate redundancies, improve grammar, or correct typos. Smith is very creative, loves putting good ideas together, and is less interested in the final product. He reminds me of Isaac Asimov, who used to keep five Selectrics going, each with a different project. “Kill Game” is a unique, fascinating mystery, with enough throw-away ideas and subplots to fuel a series; and, to date, he has written three more. This novel was relatively short, fast-moving, and engrossing, and I highly recommend it.
Slow, unimaginative, lacking chemistry
How can you live your life not knowing that your ex-husband had a whole other life/lives?!?!? Read this page turner to find out!!!
excellent can’t put down. From start to finish , can expect any thing to happen
For sure would recommend reading.
Book is written for older people that find “Murder She Wrote” and “Matlock” episodes to be complicated and hard to solve.
Featuring some of the dumbest detectives and the shoddiest police work ever, the book is full of factual contradictions, grammatical errors, a syrupy romance, and product placement for KFC chicken. For example, two characters take a Cadillac Escalade from Las Vegas to Boise, Idaho. Two pages after describing them driving to Idaho, the characters land at the Boise airport having been on a private jet. A corporation is described as being founded in 1989; two pages later it is said to have been established in 1986. A woman says she had a joint checking account with her husband; a couple of chapters later she says they had separate checking accounts.
Can you see where this sort of factual contradictions just might be a problem in a murder mystery?
Speaking of checking accounts, one of the female detectives was married to the murder victim for four years before she discovered he was not contributing money to their expenses. She also never found out what her husband of four years did for a living. Or where he went when he left home for weeks at a time. I would hope a detective would be curious about things that her spouse was doing. I mean, after four years you might want to find out what he does and where he goes for weeks.
KFC is name-checked 10 times in this book. Chicken is mentioned 36 times. Ice tea is the only beverage that two character drink and it is mentioned 12 times. There are so many dining scenes in this book it is incredible. In one sequence the group had KFC chicken at the poker game, then went out to eat after poker and had chicken salad, then the next day they had chicken for lunch.
The other huge negative about this book is the sappy, mawkish romance that buds between two of the detective characters. Both are old enough to be retired from the police force yet they each have teenage type crushes on each other. Their thoughts towards each other are fully described–and frequently too. Frequently.
I was going to quit reading about a third of the way into it, but decided I had to see just how bad it could get. I was not disappointed.
Quick, easy read with interesting characters and intriguing plot.
Nice to read about older characters. Wish there were more books featuring experienced older people.
At their weekly poker game, a group of retired detectives decide to look at cold cases. Really takes twists and turns. They do solve some old cases.
Not what I expected, but a good read! Kept me interested and rooting for the good guys/girls!
Poor editing
Repeats phrases