Mystery

(2008)Virgil Flowers tries to work out murders of what turns out to be a group of men responsible for a murder of a family in Vietnam at the end of the war there. The group were there selling stolen Caterpillar equipment. A woman relative of the murdered family brings a team from Vietnam to get revenge. (book jacket) John Sandford's introduction of Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers in Dark of the Moon was an immediate critic al and popular success: "An immensely satisfyingtale by a writer at the top of his game" (The Providence journal); "an idiosyncratic, thoroughly ingratiating hero" (Booklist); "Sandford makes Flowers such an interesting character, and this is such a good story, that you'll be up late" (Richmond Times-Dispatch). But now it's Flowers who's up late. Flowers is only in his late thirties, but he's been around the block a few times, and he doesn't think much can surprise him anymore. He's wrong. It's a hot, humid summer night in Minnesota, and Flowers is in bed with one of his ex-wives (thes econd one, if you're keeping count) when the phone rings. It's Lucas Davenport. There's a body in Stillwater, two shots to the head, found near a veterans' memorial. And the victim has a lemon in his mouth. Exactly like the body they found last week....

Virgil is called into a case involving murders of Vietnam veterans and discovers revenge has a long arm and can be assisted by an unlikely US ally. ( )

This is what I used to call an airplane book. Action with maybe a little mystery, but doesn’t require much concentration, and usually not very plausible.
The author introduces his loony leftist liberal beliefs into the story.
Overall a quick entertaining read ( )

I'm glad I discovered this series. It's my favorite type of casual reading - a good plot, interesting characters and dialog, and a bit of scattered humor to keep from taking it too seriously.

The story here is complex and interesting. I had no idea what was going on until it was revealed near the end, where we find that more or less nobody is what they seem to be.

I like that the lines are not so sharp between good and evil. Virgil, the cop, doesn't like using a gun, wears t-shirts from obscure bands, and doesn't draw such sharp lines between right and wrong, legal and illegal, etc, as some cops. He's more interested in justice, not punishing people for mistakes or petty crimes, many of which he knows about personally.

He never really wanted to be a cop. His degree was in environmental science, but there's not much demand for that. He likes to write nature articles for magazines, he sometimes toes a fishing boat behind his government-supplied vehicle, to the consternation of his boss, and he'd mostly rather be fishing (catch and release, mostly). His hair is a bit longer than most cops, and he's basically pretty laid back, although his success rate is second to none in solving crimes.

It's hard to feel any animosity against most of the criminals. Even the murderers may not seem so bad in many ways; sometimes, their intentions are noble, but they make mistakes and hey, they murder people, which is not a good thing.

The stories remind me a bit of the TV series Justified, which I liked a lot, except the bad guys in this series are not as dumb as some of the ones in Justified, and it's not as humorous. ( )