The Sixth Idea
The Monkeewrench crew returns in a twisty, heart-stopping new thriller.
The peaceful Christmas season in Minneapolis is shattered when two friends, Chuck Spencer and Wally Luntz, scheduled to meet in person for the first time, are murdered on the same night, two hours and several miles apart, dramatically concluding winter vacation for homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth.
An hour north of Minneapolis, Lydia Ascher comes home to find two dead men in her basement. When Leo and Gino discover her connection to their current cases, they suspect that she is a target, too. The same day, an elderly, terminally ill man is kidnapped from his home, an Alzheimer’s patient goes missing from his care facility, and a baffling link among all the crimes emerges.
This series of inexplicable events sends the detectives sixty years into the past to search for answers—and straight to Grace MacBride’s Monkeewrench, a group of eccentric computer geniuses who devote their time and resources to helping the cops solve the unsolvable. What they find is an unimaginable horror—a dormant Armageddon that might be activated at any moment unless Grace and her partners Annie, Roadrunner, and Harley Davidson, along with Leo and Gino, can find a way to stop it.
Readers also enjoyed
P. J. Tracy
PJ Tracy is the pseudonym of the mother-daughter writing duo P.J. and Traci Lambrecht, winners of the Anthony, Barry, Gumshoe, and Minnesota Book Awards. Their cyberthriller “Monkeewrench” series (Monkeewrench, Live Bait, Dead Run, Snow Blind, Shoot to Thrill, Off the Grid, The Sixth Idea, and Nothing Stays Buried) were national and international bestsellers. After PJ’s passing in 2016, Traci wrote two more books in the Monkeewrench series (The Guilty Dead and Ice Cold Heart), and began the Margaret Nolan Detective series, set in Los Angeles, where she lived for many years. Deep into the Dark, Desolation Canyon, The Devil You Know, and City of Secrets have been lauded by critics and fans alike. The eleventh Monkeewrench novel, The Deepest Cut, will be released in September of 2025. She now resides in Minnesota and continues to write about murder and mayhem.
A Monkeewrench Novel
A Monkeewrench Novel consists of eleven books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.

