August 12 Sunday Salon (a facebook group for book bloggers)
Because I am newly resolved to blogging more often, I am
posting again – two weeks in a row on Sunday Salon. Woohoo!!! A habit for others, a record for me. Reading this week included more mysteries.
I finished John Sandford’s Bad Blood, a “Virgil Flowers novel,” and then just when I was about to
swing back to literary fiction, another mystery, one that I had preordered from
Amazon, arrived in the mail.
I couldn’t resist. I
had a temp job lined up the next day that required sporadically directing
others and allowed nearly eight straight hours of reading.
I dove into Paul
Doiron’s Bad Little Falls, the third
in a series featuring Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch.
I am just coming up for air and blogging, with a full review
likely to follow this week. Doiron’s
first book was the subject of my first review on this blog, a little more than
a year ago, so I have a particular fondness for this self-assignment.
Back to Sandford. It seems I have some catching up to
do. I had never read Sandford’s works
before and only picked this one up at the library for a slightly silly reason.
One of my favorite television stars, Mark Harmon, who plays Leroy Jethro Gibbs
on NCIS, is a fan. Harmon took on the role of Lucas Davenport last year in a USA television movie
“Certain Prey. “ I figured whatever Gibbs --
oops, I mean Harmon -- likes, I might like. How easy it is to conflate the two. There are 22 titles in the Davenport/ “Prey”
series, in the “Kidd” series and five more (in addition to Bad Blood) in the
Virgil Flowers series. Good reading
ahead. Sandford is the pseudonym of
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist John Roswell Camp.
Bad Blood was fun to read. After a daisy chain of murders –
three in the first 30 or so pages, Sheriff Lee (a female) Coaxley, calls in
Virgil Flowers of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. What she and he eventually uncover (other
than themselves together alone) is a religious cult involved in what it seems
many closed groups get into – sex abuse. In addition to the nice contrast between two
adults in consensual sex and the plot's multiple partners in creepy unconventional and non-consensual
sex, the Flowers- Coaxley combination offers plenty of clever sexy repartee.
Humor stands out for me in Sandford’s writing. One of Flowers’ unconventional methods of
gathering tips and applying pressure to the guilty is to announce his progress
in the local Yellow Dog Café. All the
town’s ears tune in while he blabs to the owner about the ongoing
investigation. Takes a village to catch
the guilty, along with Flowers’ expertise.
I’ll be reading
more. Sandford’s writing makes me
smile.
One down. Thirty-one
to go.
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