A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

Escape Clause is the ninth Virgil Flowers novel by John Sandford.  I have previously reviewed the first eight installments of this series here on the blogs.  Here's a link to the last one: Deadline .  And you can click on the John Sandford tag or search John Sandford on the blog to find the others.  In this installment Flowers takes on a wild case that quickly escalates from thievery/catnapping to murder. When two rare, endangered tigers are catnapped from the state zoo, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension puts their best investigator on the case that could become a public relations nightmare if the tigers turn up dead.  Unfortunately scant clues and even less evidence leads to few leads for Flowers to follow up.  So he does what he does best: he starts asking questions, gathering information, and learning the local players in the illegal animal poaching and traditional medicine communities.  Eventually he bumps up against a name, Winston Peck, M....

If you've read this blog for a while now, you know that John Sandford's Virgil Flowers series is one of the series that I read.   Deadline is the eighth installment in this series.  I've read and reviewed all the previous installments on this blog.  You can click here to read the review for the previous installment in the series.  I've been doing some thinking about some of these story lines and the crimes that Virgil Flowers' has investigated over the course of the series, and some have been a little absurd and ridiculous (and in some cases, Virgil has even agreed with me!  See the review for Storm Front , the book right before Deadline ).  I'm thinking about the one in which he goes up against some Vietnamese spies/assassins that come to Minnesota to rain down some vengeance stemming from a forty or fifty year old massacre that happened half a world away and the last one in which a Da Vinci Code -esque Biblical archaeological artifact heist is at the ...

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 th...

I know, I know.  It's been a very long time since I've posted a review--because it's a very long time since I've read a book.  I'd started a few, but finished none and was fretting about how long this dry spell would last when along comes Shock Wave by John Sandford.  It is the latest installment in the Virgil Flowers series, and it picks up about six months after the end of the last novel in the series.  There was a wait for the book--and I think there still might be a long list of holds for the book.  It was a very fast read--it only took me a few days to read it. Shock Wave is so titled because of the rash of bombings at the story's center.  It tells of the latest, big investigation for Virgil Flowers, the sometime writer and eternal fisherman who is also the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension's top investigator and the governor's "third most favorite troublemaker." On his day off, Virgil is called in to investigate when a bom...