Eventually, he settles on the owner of a security company involved with the upcoming Republican National Convention as his prime suspect. When Flowers learns that Vietnamese firing squads stuck lemons in the mouths of their human targets, he pursues leads in the local immigrant community, where he hooks up with the attractive daughter of a radical professor who'd written a paper about Agent Orange. Sanderson's killing is one in a series, and Flowers soon discovers that all the victims served together in Vietnam. 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.At the start of bestseller Sandford's solid second thriller to feature officer Virgil Flowers of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (after Dark of the Moon), a gunman shoots Bobby Sanderson as he's walking his dog one night in Stillwater, Minn., then places a lemon in the dead man's mouth. 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.
It's hard to feel any animosity against most of the criminals.
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. 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 degree was in environmental science, but there's not much demand for that. He's more interested in justice, not punishing people for mistakes or petty crimes, many of which he knows about personally. 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.
I like that the lines are not so sharp between good and evil. 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. The story here is complex and interesting. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
