What do you think?
Rate this book
Reid Bennett #2
Murder on Ice
When the newly crowned queen of the annual Ice Festival is kidnapped and another young girl turns up dead, Reid Bennett, the one-man police force of Murphy's Harbor, stalks a deadly kidnapper and killer through the snowbound town
Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
10 people are currently reading
101 people want to read
About the author
Ted Wood
36 books23 followersBorn Edward John Wood in Shoreham, Sussex, England, he lived in London until the outbreak of the Second World War. Enforced relocation to rural Worcestershire, which left him with a lifelong love of the countryside, was followed by service in RAF Coastal Command. In 1954 he immigrated to Canada, where he was a policeman in Toronto for three years. In 1957 he joined MacLaren Advertising as a copywriter, eventually becoming a creative director. He now lives in Whitby, Ontario.
While employment in law enforcement and advertising provided food and shelter for his growing family, Wood found time to write and sell short stories to Canadian and American magazines and to write television plays; he also collaborated on the musical comedy Mister Scrooge, which was produced in Toronto and on cbc television. In 1974 he published a collection of Chekhovian short stories, Somebody Else's Summer.
His Dead in the Water (1984) won the Scribner's Crime Novel Award, and publication in the USA and Canada. The book featured a small-town policeman, Reid Bennett, and his dog Sam—the entire law enforcement needs of Murphy's Harbour, a fictional resort community in the Muskoka region of Ontario. Bennett's and Sam's popularity was enough to extend the series though Murder on Ice (1984) to its current tenth title, A Clean Kill (1995), and to have the books also published in England and in many translations. A second series featuring a peripatetic Toronto-based bodyguard, John Locke, has thus far extended to three titles: Hammerlocke (1986), Lockestep (1987) and Timelocke (1991).
Source: Ted Wood Biography - (b. 1931), Mister Scrooge, Somebody else's summer, Dead in the water
Librarian Note: The John Locke series is published under the pseudonym Jack Barnao.
While employment in law enforcement and advertising provided food and shelter for his growing family, Wood found time to write and sell short stories to Canadian and American magazines and to write television plays; he also collaborated on the musical comedy Mister Scrooge, which was produced in Toronto and on cbc television. In 1974 he published a collection of Chekhovian short stories, Somebody Else's Summer.
His Dead in the Water (1984) won the Scribner's Crime Novel Award, and publication in the USA and Canada. The book featured a small-town policeman, Reid Bennett, and his dog Sam—the entire law enforcement needs of Murphy's Harbour, a fictional resort community in the Muskoka region of Ontario. Bennett's and Sam's popularity was enough to extend the series though Murder on Ice (1984) to its current tenth title, A Clean Kill (1995), and to have the books also published in England and in many translations. A second series featuring a peripatetic Toronto-based bodyguard, John Locke, has thus far extended to three titles: Hammerlocke (1986), Lockestep (1987) and Timelocke (1991).
Source: Ted Wood Biography - (b. 1931), Mister Scrooge, Somebody else's summer, Dead in the water
Librarian Note: The John Locke series is published under the pseudonym Jack Barnao.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
September 30, 2018
It is January as Murder On Ice by Ted Wood begins. Murphy Harbor is cold and snowy as befits the area 200 miles north of Toronto. This second book in the series finds police Chief Reid Bennett still dealing with some of the repercussions from events in Dead In The Water.
Long known for their summer tourism, one of the local business men has created a new event, the winter carnival. While this is the second annual event, for Chief Bennett this is his first though he is not that concerned. While there have been a few strangers around, it, the event is not anywhere big enough to have garnered much attention beyond the locals. Most are just treating it as another excuse to get drunk so the local bar is doing a brisk business. The highlight, over at the local Legion Hall, will be to select a queen of the winter carnival. Chief Bennett along with his police dog, Sam, are present to see a non-local resident and clearly the most attractive young woman around, Nancy Carmichael, crowned queen. Seconds later the lights go out, and Nancy is abducted and vanishes into the snowy night.
Chief Bennett and Sam plunge out into the night in pursuit. The kidnappers might have been able to get away with it if not for the heavy snowstorm that made travel in the area nearly impossible. Those conditions also created a trail in the snow that Bennett and Sam could follow. A trail that vanishes a little more every minute as the snow comes down.
The result is a harrowing search and investigation that results in more violence and death than clues. What at first seems to be a staged abduction by a feminist group for publicity purposes clearly has serious undertones as the bodies begin to stack up while the storm rages.
Second in the series, Murder On Ice is just as good as the first book. Fact, it might be a slightly better book. In a sense, this is a locked room mystery set outside as the weather keeps everyone bottled up and Chief Bennett can’t receive assistance from outside law enforcement. While little is done to further flesh out the Bennet character, the focus is on plenty of action and the occasional references to how combat experiences in the steamy jungles of Vietnam, help him stay alive in a nighttime frozen wilderness half a world away. A mystery full of twists, Murder On Ice by Ted Wood is strongly recommended.
Murder On Ice
Ted Wood
Charles Scribner’s Sons
1984
ISBN# 0-684-18134-7
Hardback (also available in paperback and digital formats)
175 Pages
Material supplied by the good folks of the Dallas Public Library.
Kevin R. Tipple ©2018
Long known for their summer tourism, one of the local business men has created a new event, the winter carnival. While this is the second annual event, for Chief Bennett this is his first though he is not that concerned. While there have been a few strangers around, it, the event is not anywhere big enough to have garnered much attention beyond the locals. Most are just treating it as another excuse to get drunk so the local bar is doing a brisk business. The highlight, over at the local Legion Hall, will be to select a queen of the winter carnival. Chief Bennett along with his police dog, Sam, are present to see a non-local resident and clearly the most attractive young woman around, Nancy Carmichael, crowned queen. Seconds later the lights go out, and Nancy is abducted and vanishes into the snowy night.
Chief Bennett and Sam plunge out into the night in pursuit. The kidnappers might have been able to get away with it if not for the heavy snowstorm that made travel in the area nearly impossible. Those conditions also created a trail in the snow that Bennett and Sam could follow. A trail that vanishes a little more every minute as the snow comes down.
The result is a harrowing search and investigation that results in more violence and death than clues. What at first seems to be a staged abduction by a feminist group for publicity purposes clearly has serious undertones as the bodies begin to stack up while the storm rages.
Second in the series, Murder On Ice is just as good as the first book. Fact, it might be a slightly better book. In a sense, this is a locked room mystery set outside as the weather keeps everyone bottled up and Chief Bennett can’t receive assistance from outside law enforcement. While little is done to further flesh out the Bennet character, the focus is on plenty of action and the occasional references to how combat experiences in the steamy jungles of Vietnam, help him stay alive in a nighttime frozen wilderness half a world away. A mystery full of twists, Murder On Ice by Ted Wood is strongly recommended.
Murder On Ice
Ted Wood
Charles Scribner’s Sons
1984
ISBN# 0-684-18134-7
Hardback (also available in paperback and digital formats)
175 Pages
Material supplied by the good folks of the Dallas Public Library.
Kevin R. Tipple ©2018
April 17, 2021
Ted Wood wrote a series of police mysteries set in a lakeside town in northern Ontario. Featuring tough Vietnam vet and former Toronto cop, Reid Bennett, and his even tougher dog, Sam, they were uniformly excellent. Murder on Ice captures a small town Canada event, the teen queen pageant at the local Legion. All is well until the winner is kidnapped. Then all hell breaks loose. At first, this looks like a prank by a cabal of angry feminists, but when the smoke clears, some very nasty criminals are involved. Bennett is a hard dude, and no one should mistake these books for “cozies.” This story is taut, and at times disturbing. Wood’s take on feminism hasn’t aged well, but this is still a great outing in a first rate series. Read late at night with a bottle of Rye and a shot glass.
February 17, 2018
Nothing special
August 1, 2019
Great book
This book was entertaining and had many plot twists and not at all predictable. It kept me guessing until the very end.
This book was entertaining and had many plot twists and not at all predictable. It kept me guessing until the very end.
Want to read
July 19, 2020elibrary
September 1, 2020
This was one of those novels I could not put down. Kept me guessing with a well written knowledgeable plot! A very exciting read!
February 26, 2022
Reid is the chief and only cop in Murphy's Harbour, Ontario. A good sense of place in this snowy rough country mystery.
November 24, 2022
Nothing earthshattering, but passed the time
December 29, 2023
A very good and entertaining quick read, but maybe a little less believable than the first in the series.
July 23, 2025
I think I was unable to connect with the main character.
November 28, 2025
Not bad. Better than first.
Read
October 3, 2016Murder on ice is a very well written book with an incredible plot making the book hard to put down because you want to find out what keeps happening and why. The setting takes place in the cold wintery tundra of Canada. I absolutely loved this book and would give it a 10/10 because it is filled with suspense, mystery, and sacrifice.
December 14, 2010
The sensibilities in this book were outdated before it was even published. Wood/Reid has the misogyny and machismo of a man at his prime in the 1920's or 1940's, and let's be honest here, this is a masturbatory fantasy by a retired cop who cannot and never lived his fantasy of being "a shining knight." All the women are weak and helpless or meddling harpies... sometimes they are DUMB meddling harpies. Wood/Reid treats feminism as a phase that "nice, young attractive" women go through and "plain, man-haters" default to since they can't get a real man. If Reid's contempt were limited just to the women I might have actually gotten past it and been able to focus on the story, but instead he seems to have contempt for pretty much everyone involved in the story. Everyone except for his dog, anyway.
This is particularly obnoxious since Reid himself is more or less a bumbling idiot with a heightened sense of self-importance. He relies mostly on his marine training to get him out of bad spots, but as far as "solving the mystery" that mostly gets done by sheer DUMB, DUMB, DUMB luck.
He isn't even a very nice guy. By the middle of the book he's acting as much like a bad guy as the bad guys. He's ordering people around, breaking arms and kicking faces with no regard as to whether or not it's legal OR moral. Reid even admits that he is incapable of sympathy after finding a young woman who has been raped, after telling her to swab herself and save the swab he tells us this as the narrator, "She needed a doctor to check her, a woman to comfort her. i was neither. I was a rough-and-ready copper trying to compensate for the crime and the criminal ugliness of the weather." What. I'm sorry, but are you that inhuman that you can't even _attempt_ to show compassion for a human being who has likely just had the worst experience of her life? Do you have a mother? Would you just stare there dumbly and be all, "Well, I ain't a doctor nor a woman, so I can't do nothing" if it was a woman you knew who had just been raped? What is WRONG with this guy?!
Other things that pissed me off were attitudes towards homosexuals, which were mentioned less frequently, but still frequently enough to get me really angry. But then, I'm wearing my blue jeans. "I might have guessed. Like all good man-haters, Nancy Carmichael had put on blue jeans."
On top of all this the plot was entirely too convoluted with plots in plots in plots, most of which made no sense and had me rolling my eyes and gagging and wanting to throw the book across the room.
I really hope Ted Wood has grown up and actually realizes that feminists aren't man-haters, we just hate men like him. Not because they have penises, but because they are jerks.
This is particularly obnoxious since Reid himself is more or less a bumbling idiot with a heightened sense of self-importance. He relies mostly on his marine training to get him out of bad spots, but as far as "solving the mystery" that mostly gets done by sheer DUMB, DUMB, DUMB luck.
He isn't even a very nice guy. By the middle of the book he's acting as much like a bad guy as the bad guys. He's ordering people around, breaking arms and kicking faces with no regard as to whether or not it's legal OR moral. Reid even admits that he is incapable of sympathy after finding a young woman who has been raped, after telling her to swab herself and save the swab he tells us this as the narrator, "She needed a doctor to check her, a woman to comfort her. i was neither. I was a rough-and-ready copper trying to compensate for the crime and the criminal ugliness of the weather." What. I'm sorry, but are you that inhuman that you can't even _attempt_ to show compassion for a human being who has likely just had the worst experience of her life? Do you have a mother? Would you just stare there dumbly and be all, "Well, I ain't a doctor nor a woman, so I can't do nothing" if it was a woman you knew who had just been raped? What is WRONG with this guy?!
Other things that pissed me off were attitudes towards homosexuals, which were mentioned less frequently, but still frequently enough to get me really angry. But then, I'm wearing my blue jeans. "I might have guessed. Like all good man-haters, Nancy Carmichael had put on blue jeans."
On top of all this the plot was entirely too convoluted with plots in plots in plots, most of which made no sense and had me rolling my eyes and gagging and wanting to throw the book across the room.
I really hope Ted Wood has grown up and actually realizes that feminists aren't man-haters, we just hate men like him. Not because they have penises, but because they are jerks.
March 28, 2013
Just plain silly. He lost me when his intrepid policeman gives his gun away to the strange naked girl he meets on the ice... "There's a gun for you in my coat pocket." "Gee, thanks Mister!" Silly, silly stuff. Leave the crime fighting to the German Shepherd. And who decided Wood is Canada's favourite crime writer?
June 28, 2015
Wild north
While having a beauty pageant, the queen is kidnapped. Using a snow mobile to track the kidnappers, Reid is ambushed and has to save himself and others.
While having a beauty pageant, the queen is kidnapped. Using a snow mobile to track the kidnappers, Reid is ambushed and has to save himself and others.
February 22, 2016
A mystery that is based in Northern Ontario, which has some interesting twists
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews