Starred review from August 11, 2014
In Thriller Award–winner Sandford’s stellar eighth Virgil Flowers novel (after 2013’s Storm Front), the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agent, who works for Lucas Davenport, the hero of the author’s other major series, helps friend Johnson Johnson with a little problem that keeps growing in the Mississippi River town of Trippton. Johnson’s neighbors are concerned about a series of dognappings by hillbillies who live up by inaccessible Orly’s Creek. Roy Zorn, a “small-time motorcycle hood,” might also be manufacturing some meth up that way. If Virgil can’t solve the dog problem, dog lovers may shift to open warfare. Meanwhile, the members of the Buchanan County Consolidated School Board, fearing they’ll all go to prison, vote unanimously to kill reporter Clancy Conley, who “inadvertently discovered that the school board was stealing the school system blind.” Virgil doesn’t get much help from Sheriff Jeff Purdy, but 12-year-old McKinley Ruff and high school janitor Will Bacon provide critical assistance as panicky board members escalate the violence. Sandford is an accomplished and amusing storyteller, and he nails both the rural characters and terrain as well as he has skewered urban life in past installments. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.
September 15, 2014
Virgil Flowers, agreeing to check out the most minor crime imaginable in sleepy Trippton, Minnesota, finds himself in a steadily deepening pool of felonies. You may think dognapping is no big deal, but try telling that to Winky Butterfield, whose two black Labs have been carried off by D. Wayne Sharf. As Virgil's friend Johnson Johnson tells it, this latest theft is only part of a much larger pattern that's riled the dog-loving citizens of Buchanan County to demand action-if not from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, then from themselves. Eager to avoid a vigilante outbreak, Virgil (Storm Front, 2013, etc.) agrees to look for the missing pooches and promptly finds a meth lab that seems like a much bigger deal, at least to the BCA. Little does he know that a completely unrelated matter is about to nudge Trippton into wholesale violence. Members of the Buchanan County Consolidated School Board, tipped off that has-been reporter Clancy Conley is about to blow the whistle on their long-running embezzlement scheme, vote to have Conley killed and then are forced under pressure from Virgil's investigation to target ever more victims in order to cover their tracks. The school board meetings, in which cutthroat discussions of ways and means end with formal endorsements of murder that would do any parliamentarian proud, have a subversively comic edge that perfectly complements Virgil's straight-faced attempts to turn the board members against each other by urging everyone involved to rat out everyone else as they circle the wagons in ever shrinking patterns. The meth investigation winds up quickly and quietly, but Sandford keeps one last surprise up his sleeve for the denouement of the dognapping case, and it's a doozy. Exhilaratingly professional work by both Virgil and his creator that breaks no new ground but will keep the fans happy and add to their number.
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October 1, 2014
Clancy Conley's journalism career has fallen victim to his methamphetamine addiction, and he's bounced to the bottom of the career ladder, writing part-time for a weekly paper in rural Trippton, Missouri. And that's where his story ends. Clancy is inexplicably gunned down while jogging, and state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agent Virgil Flowers (Storm Front, 2013), already in town helping his friend Johnson Johnson track down a serial dognapper, is just curious enough to pull rank and investigate. Clancy told his friend Wendy, Trippton's lady of the evening, that he was working on an explosive story that would revive his career. But his editor denies knowing about any such story, and Clancy's computer is suspiciously missing. Undeterred, Virgil hits the jackpot when he finds Clancy's photo card. It seems Clancy had been looking into some sort of budgetary shenanigans and the dark deeds of some of Trippton's most upstanding citizens. Sanford balances straight-talking Virgil Flowers' often hilariously folksy tone and Trippton's dark core of methamphetamine manufacturers and sociopaths; the result is pure reading pleasure for thriller fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)