Skip to main content

Storm Front by John Sandford

It's been a while since I posted here.  I was reading Letters from Skye then I got distracted by Storm Front (which I am reviewing here), and now I've started an Elin Hilderbrand book, but I've not been reading very much of it because I've been distracted by other things (mostly Christmas).  Storm Front is the new installment in the Virgil Flowers series.  It has a Da Vinci Code-esque plot of which I was extremely skeptical.  It's like really, another mystical Bible mystery that could turn the world's religions on their heads AGAIN?  Even Virgil was, like, whoa, dude, really?  (It said so on the jacket blurb, okay?  HE AGREED WITH ME.)  However, this reads like any other Virgil Flowers novel.  This book also reiterated for me that Virgil has seriously questionable taste in women.  I mean, starting up a fling with the broad you're investigating for fraud?  Not.  Smart.

No sooner is a piece of rock bearing the name of the legendary, ancient Hebrew king Solomon uncovered at a remote dig in Israel than a terminally ill Lutheran minister and professor from Minnesota absconds with said stone and via Cyprus flees with it back to the U.S.  Right from the start, Virgil thinks there is something fishy about how the theft went down in Israel, but he has bigger fish to fry because the theft of the stone has triggered an international race populated by shady, dangerous characters, all of whom converge on Virgil's part of Minnesota to engage in an illegal bidding war for the stone.

The Lutheran minister, who has mere weeks left to live, is determined to sell the stone to the highest bidder.  That is, unless Virgil gets to him first or any number of individuals with various and sundry nefarious motives takes the stone by force before it can be secured and returned to Israel.  In addition to tracking the minister and the stone as well as the various shady individuals attempting to acquire the stone for their own purposes, Virgil also has to contend with the media circus that descends upon Mankato, Minnesota, as well as the loose cannon of a woman that he's investigating for fraud after she inserts herself into the international ruckus surrounding the Lutheran minister and his ill-gotten stone.

This story isn't short on plot twists, and once the story gets cranked up, the action doesn't stop.  This is a thrilling, page turner that's hard to put down, and it reads very quickly.  I highly recommend this series and this book.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip.  I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage.  The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it.  It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger.  Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read.  Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one.   Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment.  The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story.  It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve.  Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week.  This  particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst