Customer Reviews

Bad Blood: a Virgil Flowers novel

5 star:		(55)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(33)

 

 

In "Bad Blood" Virgil Flowers is brought in to investigate a strange murder at a rural Minnesota grain elevator. A farmer had pulled in with his truck of grain. The young man working at the elevator retrieves his baseball bat and sneaks up behind the farmer. He clobbers the unsuspecting man then tries to make his death look like an accident, but this killing was clearly premeditated. Flowers is called in to this area where murders rarely occur by the new sheriff, an attractive woman named Lee Coakley. There's clearly a spark struck between them from the start.

But no time for romance yet. Crimes must be investigated. Within the first 40 pages there are 4 deaths, the farmer, then the young man who supposedly killed the farmer, then the cop who was guarding the young man in jail. Flowers is puzzling over these sudden deaths when he hears about a 4th death; an unsolved murder of a young woman that took place down south of the town, just across the Iowa state line, a year ago. That killing looked like a sex crime. Virgil is intrigued.

He discovers a key link between these 4 deaths: every one of the dead belonged to a mysterious religious cult. Flowers digs deeper and begins to suspect that this "religion" conceals a vast and enduring front for widespread child abuse. No spoilers here; I'll leave the joys of Virgil's sleuthing and his budding relationship with the sheriff for readers to savor for themselves.

Sandford performs a bit of literary derring-do here. He has his wise cracking, fun loving Virgil trying to solve a case that might involve a most horrific network of pedophiles. Child abuse is not funny. Virgil is. The combo actually works. Virgil lightens it up just enough to make all the dark parts not quite as sickening. Sandford does a splendid job on this one.

This reviewer's favorite moments occur when Virgil is always prepared to argue scripture with any cult member who tries to fling the words of the Bible Virgil's way. Virgil is the son of a Lutheran minister. He knows his scripture inside and out. He has realized that these sicko religious nuts have taken selected passages from scripture to try to justify and validate their perverted faith. "T is a thing of beauty indeed.

I read the latest Lucas Davenport novel by sandford, which also came out this year. Although I enjoyed it, it had a problem with being a bit all over the map with plots, subplots and too many characters. Thus, I thought Sandford was winding down in his writing career. This, the best of the Virgil Flowers' novels, shows I couldn't have been more wrong. This book is very tightly focused, has just the right amount of characters and has a terrific plot to boot.

As usual, this is set in a section of Minnesota which is small town, rural and in which people are leading out of the mainstream lives. Last novel it was a town full of vacationing lesbians. This time it is a religious cult which has been home grown since the 1800s, which involves extreme sexual deviance. Suddenly, the town goes from one murder to four murders. All murder victims had some contact with the cult. This brings the state Criminal Bureau into town along with its lead roving detective, Virgil Flowers, who walks around town more like the roadie for some touring rock group than an investigator hunting down a cult. That he forgets to wear his gun most of the time is part of the problem and why he always has to drag out identification.

Many of the Virgil Flowers' books have a terrific shootout, like the OK Corral, occur at some point. This book has an absolute doozy of one, an all time high. Also one of the best vengeance scenes I've ever read.

This is Sandford at his best. I read it in 24 hours.

The Virgil Flowers series is a well-written, interesting, captivating series. Virgil is a lawman in Minnesota and gets involved in big cases. This one is about the separate but intertwined murders of four people, all of whom are involved in a small, fundamentalist, local religion which the members keep very private. Some of the members are involved in incest, rape, and sexual deviancy with children. It is up to Virgil and a local female sheriff to solve the murders and to save the children of the religious group who are being abused. John Sanford's writing is very good; he also writes the Prey series, and the Virgil Flowers series is a spinoff of the Prey series. This book held my attention all the way through and already has me salivating for the next in the series. The formatting for the Kindle is excellent. I highly recommend this book and series.

John Sandford's latest entry in his Virgil Flowers series suffers from a lot of flaws but is ultimately still an acceptable read. Sandford is a very competent writer, so even when he's not writing at his best the resulting work is usually better than much of what lesser writers are putting out there. Still, Sandford has done and can do much better, and I think in the Flowers series he sometimes really lets himself go and indulges some of his sloppier failings.

Like its predecessor Flowers novels, Bad Blood doesn't supply too much in the way of suspense or mystery since as has been his habit of late, Sandford in many scenes throughout the book places the reader inside the heads of the very dysfunctional and unlikable perps. This doesn't really enhance the enjoyablity of the story, and it makes much of the weight of keeping the reader's interest fall on the dialog (entertaining in general) and the usual apocalyptically violent shootout ending which has become an expected inside joke both among Flowers' fictional colleagues and Sandford's readers.

Sandford has mined the child sex crime scene before for plots and no doubt will again. This is clearly an issue close to his heart and on the one hand he's to be commended for not shrinking from the unpleasant details. But, there's also such as thing as needlessly describing in too graphically detailed a manner exactly who placed which implement or body part into which juvenile character, how many times, when, and at which locales. I don't object out of prudery - if he'd written a book with graphic sex scenes between adult characters, that would be completely different - but out of squeamishness. After a while I was flinching as I turned the pages. Other writers, using both fiction and nonfiction, have managed to raise awareness of child (sex) abuse without skirting so close to the line dividing reportage from child pornography.

There were times when I wondered if perhaps the general plot had been left over from an idea that Sandford had in the late 1980s and never developed then. Fifteen to 30 years ago there was a spate of first real, and then hysterical and false allegations of vast child sex rings in day care centers, churches, schools, etc. The ones that almost always turned out to be false simply because they were too big to be true were of the type encountered in this book: very extensive, long-lasting, relatively out in the open, but nevertheless largely unsuspected by the community's other residents. It just doesn't ring true that something this big could have gone on for so many decades unsuspected.

I did like the rural setting of southwestern Minnesota near the Iowa border. Sandford's major character, Lucas Davenport, is chained to the Twin Cities. Sandford uses the free-ranging Flowers to place other parts of the state on display. Most of the banter and flirtation between Flowers and the local lady sheriff is entertaining. I liked how the rural cops were out of their league in terms of lacking the experience to deal with a spate of murders rooted in a child abuse ring, yet not necessarily hopelessly incompetent or stupid.

All in all Bad Blood is an easy to devour airplane-type read. To digress, I don't quite understand why Amazon reviews have become dominated by the 5-star or else mentality. It makes it really hard for those for whom a certain author is not a must-read to distinguish between all the books that average 4½ stars, since that's almost everything of late. (Bad Blood's relatively low 3.8 ranking is mostly driven by some 1-star reviewers unhappy with the Kindle price). This isn't a jab aimed at those who gave this novel five stars. I just wonder if perhaps too many readers are only reviewing books they found worthy of five stars, and then perhaps at the other end books they hated enough to get energized about and warn other against.

So I don't know if it's grade inflation or a self-selection bias or both that creates a largely unhelpful inverted bell curve to the review set of so many books, but I think the only cure is for more readers to go out of their way to review books they found to be 2-, 3-, and 4-star reads, and not just waste all your ammo on the few books we find to be truly superb or dreadful. Just my suggestion / plea.

In southern Minnesota, Robert Tripp, an employee at a grain company, kills Jacob Flood, a local farmer. When Tripp is questioned by the police, Sheriff Lee Coakley breaks his story and jails him. That night, Tripp is murdered in his cell.

When Sheriff Coakley learns this, she suspects that one of her men, Jim Crocker, is involved. Because of the internal politics, she calls in investigator Virgil Flowers, from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

When Virgil goes to Crocker's home to question him, he finds Crocker murdered and made to look like he committed suicide. This area of Minnesota has very few murders and Virgil thinks that they must be connected.

Virgil looks at the three murders and is informed that a forth victim, a young teenage girl, Kelly Baker, was found in a cemetery.

In attempting to tie the murders together, Virgil finds that Tripp was gay and that Baker had some extreme sexual activity and abuse prior to her death.

One of the first people he speaks to is Flood's wife, Alma. She informs him that Crocker and her husband were childhood friends and that may have given him a reason for killing Tripp. Alma also admits that Kelly Baker was a member of their church.

Since the church affiliation was coming up more often, Virgil told Alma that his father was a minister and quoted verses from the bible but Alma didn't catch the biblical connection. Sensing a fraud, Virgil begins looking closer at just what is going on with the church.

He beings to get facts that astound him and the facts are hard for him to believe. There appear to be over a hundred families in this church and they are involved in a multigenerational sexual activity including rape, incest, and child abuse. He wonders how he will be able to stop this perversion.

The church members won't talk about it but he must find a weak link. Where to look?

This is an extremely well plotted and suspenseful novel that the reader will find captivating. Virgil is a wise cracking, bible quoting cop who is dedicated to finding wrongs and correcting them, however, he doesn't mind some extra curricular activity with Sheriff Lee Coakley.

Highly recommended.

A likeable high school graduate with great potential as a college athlete throws away his future by commiting premeditated murder as this novel opens; soon after his arrest he himself is murdered in his jail cell; soon after that the person who murdered him is also murdered; and soon after the third murder the reader learns that these three murders are somehow related to a fourth murder of a teenage girl that occurred about a year earlier.

And therein lies the tension and suspense in this novel, which early on discloses the identity of the three current murderers. But the challenge for state investigator Virgil Flowers is to discover the motive for each of the three murders and how they are linked to the earlier murder. Along the way he develops a romantic relationship with the newly elected female sheriff in a rural area of Minnesota who has requested Flowers' help. Ultimately Flowers discovers a dark secret of abusive sex with both adults and children that has been practiced for nearly a century by a group of people who have perverted the Bible to justify a private cult-like religion called World of Spirit that encourages and condones incest, rape and sexual slavery.

The writing is crisp, the plot is interesting, and the ending is satisfying. This is quick, easy reading that captures your attention right at the beginning without wasting any time and never lets go. Having said that, Virgil Flowers lacks the witty sarcasm of Lee Child's Jack Reacher, the complexity of James Patterson's Alex Cross, or the depth of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch. At times I found his character rather dull, though this novel never was, and I enjoyed reading it. I think Sandford handled a gruesome topic in a mature and nonsensational way without minimizing the depravity and horror of what occurred. This is definitely a good read.

It wasn't all that long ago that John Sandford was known almost exclusively for his series of novels concerning Lucas Davenport, an investigator for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and a special troubleshooter for the governor. I am not forgetting the Kidd series; it's just that we haven't seen any action on that front for a while. Maybe someday, once again.

In the meantime, Sandford has other stories to tell, and in the last three years, he has spun off a series from the Davenport mythos involving Virgil Flowers, a Minnesota state investigator. Flowers theoretically serves under Davenport in the same manner in which one can theoretically herd a group of cats. He does his own thing and goes his own way, giving his boss plausible deniability of his actions when he skirts the rules. As is documented in this fine series (of which the newly published BAD BLOOD is the fourth), Flowers seems to be known all over Minnesota, to law enforcement and civilians alike, by a cheerfully obscene nickname due to the fact that he and chaos seem to be more than nodding acquaintances. This has more to do with the type of criminal Flowers pursues as opposed to any particular actions on his part, although certainly both are elements that result in the combustion that inevitably occurs.

Sandford seems to have a country mouse (Flowers) and city mouse (Davenport) thing going with his two series, and that pattern holds true in BAD BLOOD. This particular volume begins with a train wreck sequence of deaths that occurs in and around rural southern Minnesota within a few days of each other and appears to be connected. The local sheriff requests the assistance of Flowers in the investigation; he agrees, but is barely on the scene before another death occurs. Flowers begins pulling investigative threads, literally, and concludes that these sudden, mysterious deaths in this otherwise quiet farming community seem to have some connection with the death of a young woman a year previously who also resided in the area.

Looking for some commonality among the deaths, Flowers concludes that the nexus of all these events is a local religious community that keeps to itself and does not welcome outsiders. To outward appearances, the church seems odd yet unremarkable, though in fact it is anything but. There is much that goes on behind closed doors in the area, as a quiet evil does unspeakable things. I thought of Edmund Burke's famous statement --- "all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" --- and, indeed, what Flowers uncovers will blow the lid off of the community. Literally. A rough justice is administered at the book's conclusion, one that is equal to the crimes committed and all the more satisfying for it.

BAD BLOOD is more thriller than mystery or police procedural, given that the who, what and why is revealed fairly early in the proceedings, at least to the reader. This gives Sandford room to tinker a bit with the plot and let Flowers wander in ever-shrinking circles toward the truth. Then, of course, he has to prove it with admissible evidence, a task easier said than done. The star element, however, is the dialogue. When literary dialogue is mentioned, one thinks of Elmore Leonard, and rightly so. One should also think of John Sandford, who shines in composing the sharp-tongued but (mostly) well-intended repartee that reflects the rough camaraderie and hail fellowship of capable men in a field, doing bad business with good intent.

From the get-go, Flowers has been presented by Sandford as a bit of a good-natured rake. While he came up dry in the romance department in his last outing (2009's ROUGH COUNTRY), Flowers finds his brain leaking from his ears, metaphorically speaking. If you know what I mean. For so many reasons, BAD BLOOD is very, very good indeed.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

That's what a lot of the women say. A devil, in many meanings. This series always finds the edge of kinky. Virgil finds bad stuff in an old time religious cult. Snappy dialogue, good action, fast page turning. All that we come to expect from an author who is a pro. And Virgil can be a funny guy. He can run an investigation from a town diner, using the community. Some day that could backfire. But this time, plan when to start, you won't want to stop til you finish.

Bad Blood is a murder mystery with religious undertones where Minnesota investigator tries to find the common link between three murders where there doesn't seem to be. As he searches for clues, he learns of a group of farmers with their own church that may be the connection. I don't believe I have read any previous Virgil Flowers stories before but this one certain grabbed hold of me. This is book is sexually explicit and may be disturbing to some. There are some twists and false leads. I found the book to be so intense and the plot so fascinating that I will have to read the previous Flowers stories.

I listened to this as an audio book and similar to the other Flowers novels I've read, I found it entertaining enough. Flowers is a likeable lead and the story moved along at a steady clip, with a big `Showdown at the OK Coral' style shootout near the end. The plot itself strains credibility a little and there were a few fairly obvious holes in logic. The one that irritated me most was when Flowers and his team are unable to prove whether or not a death was suicide or murder. It shouldn't even have to occur to anyone to test for gun powder residue on the victim and the witness/possible killer - it should just be routine procedure - but because the plot requires it, no one even suggests it and no tests are done. Flowers is remarkably free in sharing information and speculating about the investigation with just about anyone he meets which seems inadvisable for anyone in law enforcement but I guess that's part of his charm, however unlikely it might be.

There is no mystery as to who the bad guys are in this novel, which isn't something that bothers me, but if you like a little who-dun-it in your crime fiction, you may be disappointed by the lack of mystery. The novel centers around a religious cult that engages in sexual abuse of women and children so readers who are uncomfortable with that sort of content may want to avoid this novel.

All in all, this was a reasonable diversion for me while driving. I know not to expect too much from these novels but for what it is, it kept me moderately entertained. 3 unremarkable stars.