Fiction review: Rough Country

FICTION

Gone fishin'.

They might be two of the most beautiful words in the language, conjuring an image of relaxation, solitude (or companionship, if chosen), the joys of nature and the absence of the 24/7 cycle of tweets and bulletins and phone calls.

That's where Virgil Flowers, an ace investigative agent for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension finds himself as "Rough Country," the third entry in John Sandford's spin-off series, begins -- musky fishing in Minnesota's North Woods. But his boss, Lucas Davenport, manages to contact him with a puzzling, and perhaps politically charged, case.

Sandford's long-running "Prey" series featuring Davenport has been a roaring success for 20 years. The author introduced Flowers -- who looks like a surfer dude and sometimes acts like one -- in "Invisible Prey" and quickly gave him a series of his own.

This time out, Flowers is assigned to a murder at Eagle Nest Lodge, a women-only retreat where Erica McDill, the CEO of an advertising agency in the Twin Cities, has been shot to death while kayaking.

Erica, whose sexuality is primarily lesbian, has been on the verge of acquiring majority ownership in the agency and planning a personnel purge. While relaxing at Eagle Nest, she becomes involved with Wendy Ashbach, the talented and gay lead vocalist of a local country band.

Wendy, who's already in an affair with the band's female drummer, longs for stardom, and Erica dangles the prospect before her. But then the ad exec is killed.

As his investigation proceeds, Flowers is torn between two motives: greed and lust. But as Sandford unfurls the story, the reader is keenly aware that a single explanation may be too simple. Flowers encounters other possible suspects -- including Zoe Tull, a gay accountant he has befriended (and Wendy's former lover); Wendy's strange father and brother; disgruntled employees of the ad agency; and other members of Wendy's band.

But the case takes two unexpected twists. Flowers learns that a gay woman who had stayed at the lodge had been strangled near her Iowa home two years earlier. And a devoted housewife is shot -- with the same rifle that killed Erica McDill -- while riding her bicycle in the Minnesota town nearest the lodge.

Sandford excels at all the required elements of the novelist: plot, personality and prose.

A master of the thriller -- his next "Prey" installment will be his 20th -- he combines the grit of the thriller with the puzzle of the whodunit in the Flowers series. The melding is masterful and produces an exquisitely paced book at once beautiful and profane, a story that fans of both crime-novel approaches can enjoy.

He makes Flowers as appealing and captivating a character as always: a cop who's not afraid to mix it up, seeks and finds sex with joyful regularity, thinks about God before falling asleep most nights and practices outdoors journalism as a sideline.

And Sandford's writing is clear and often striking:

"The eagle came back.

"She saw it coming a half-mile out, unmistakable in its size, a giant bird floating along on unmoving wings.

"A thousand feet away, it carved a turn in the crystalline air, like a skier on a downhill, and banked away."

With a confident touch, Sandford brings it all home in "Rough Country" -- and hooks the reader from the first page.

Contact Jay Strafford at (804) 649-6698 or .