Voodoo Ridge
A Cordell Logan Mystery • Book 3
by David Freed
Why You'll Love This
A Cold War mystery locked in Sierra Nevada ice for sixty years — and the wrong man just found it.
- Great if you want: aviation-flavored mysteries with a wry, complicated protagonist
- The experience: brisk and breezy with dry humor cutting through genuine tension
- The writing: Freed writes with a reporter's eye — lean, precise, and quietly funny
- Skip if: you want deep character development over plot momentum
About This Book
A wreck hidden for nearly sixty years in the Sierra Nevada. A mummified pilot still at the controls. Whatever that plane was carrying when it vanished in 1956 was worth keeping secret — and someone intends to keep it that way. When flight instructor and reluctant hero Cordell Logan spots the wreckage from the air, he sets off a chain of events that threatens not just his own life but the fragile hope of a second chance with his ex-wife. Freed builds tension from two directions at once: the cold mystery buried in the mountains and the warmer, more complicated stakes waiting back on the ground.
What separates this series from the crowded field of amateur-sleuth thrillers is Freed's voice — dry, self-aware, and genuinely funny without ever undercutting the danger. Logan is a former military assassin trying to live by Buddhist principles, and that contradiction gives the prose a wry, lived-in quality that plot mechanics alone rarely achieve. At 240 pages, the book moves with real economy, trusting readers to keep up. It rewards attention without demanding effort — the kind of mystery you finish in a sitting and immediately want to discuss.
