Dark of the Moon by John Sandford

 

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.