Virgil's first solo as he tries to find who is killing the elders in a small Minnesota town.
T-shirts, music and women provide him with continuing but minimal distractions as he stirs up the past to resolve the present. ( )

(2007) Virgil is assigned to help with the murder of an old couple that leads to several other local murders. Even the girl he falls for in town is a suspect. Turns out it was all related to the inheritance of one of the dead men's estate. Pretty good book and a good break from the Davenport series.BooklistHeaded to rural Bluestem to assist local law enforcement with the seemingly motiveless murder of an elderly couple, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers happens upon a raging house fire on the edge of town. The house's owner, Bill Judd, killed in the blaze, was an elderly recluse who, back in the day, ran an elaborate pyramid scheme and simultaneously bedded half the women in town. He escaped conviction on the fraud charge, and the money was never recovered. There have been no murders in Bluestem for a half-century, and now there are three in a couple weeks. Virgil is not an advocate of coincidence and so begins digging for a connection between the victims. Complicating matters is his affair with the sister of the local police chief. Sandford's plotting and dialogue are as crisp as ever, and the emergence of Virgil Flowers gives the author another idiosyncratic, thoroughly ingratiating hero to alternate with the ever-popular Lucas Davenport. Flowers, who made his debut as a secondary character in the Davenport thriller Invisible Prey (2007), is a low-key loose cannon whose wardrobe consists of alternative-rock t-shirts carefully chosen to match his agenda of the day. The appeal of the Davenport series is mainly tied to the hero's wit and self-deprecating humor, but this first Flowers entry is more about action: an adrenaline rush peppered with laugh-out-loud moments.

This was pretty good, though more bloody than I'm comfortable with. First of a series; I'll continue with it. ( )

I thought I had read this years ago, but didn't remember it, so I reread it. I'm glad I did, as I like the characters, and plan to read more. The story was pretty complex, and had a bit of humor mixed in, which I always like.

Virgil Flowers is an interesting guy. The son of a minister/engineer, a graduate in environmental science, a writer of outdoors magazine articles, and now a fairly laid-back cop in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension working under another John Sandford character, Lucas Davenport. He's a thinking cop, and pretty non-violent. He doesn't like to carry a gun, and once shot someone something like 12 times without killing him. Apparently, he wasn't trying very hard.

He has an interesting way of solving the crimes in this book; he writes it up as a fictional story to see where it takes him. I guess this helps him imagine what the characters are thinking and doing, and it seems to work for him.

The one thing that doesn't seem to work for him is marriage. He's been married and divorced 3 times, and has apparently given up on marriage, although his heart is having trouble believing it. He likes the ladies, and they seem to like him. ( )

Like Lee Child. Potato chips, escapist. Interesting protagonist. ( )