The day looked like the day before, sunny,
a touch of wind, about as nice a July day that you could hope for; four kids,
two boys and two girls, were dancing along the sidewalk ahead of him, boys in
dropped-crotch pants, girls with pierced ears and noses, but there was a small
town innocence about it; testing their chops, sometimes, forgetting, they'd
hold hands. They all looked back at him a couple of times, knowing him for a
cop.
Nice a day as it was, there was too much
humidity hanging around, and thunderstorms would be popping by late afternoon. If
it got hot enough, some of them could be bad. Nothing to do about it.
Admittedly this is a contemporary crime novel, set in
present-day rural Minnesota, yet this novel—the first in a series of Virgil Flowers
novels strikes me akin to the Raylan Givens novels of Dutch Leonard and the
Longmire novels of Craig Johnson.
And…what I’m going to say may strike some as anathema,
as much as I enjoy those other two authors and characters, these just might be
the best of the three.
Sandford, a former journalist brings a brisk pace to
the proceedings, seems to get all the rural police procedural details eight
where many others feel “made up.”
The character of Virgil Flowers is fine company, an
affable man who loves hunting and fishing, and the lure of the chase.
Since I’ve found this series, I’ve been whirring
through them—the titled volume, the first in the series is a fine one, some of the
others I’ve encountered since are even better.
Fans of Raylan and Longmire might find much to admire
here.
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