Even though a couple of people will ultimately be killed, there doesn't seem to be a lot of urgency in the task, though. Enter that F***in' Virgil Flowers of the Minnesota BCA who needs to quickly find the shooter before the pilgrims are driven away and the town is on the skids again. Happily, Wheatfield is now back on the road to recovery until a couple of the town's visitors are shot. All of a sudden, the town is swarming with pilgrims hoping to catch a glimpse of the Virgin. But then, miraculously (?), the Blessed Virgin Mary appears to the worshippers at the town's Catholic church. It takes place in the sleepy little town of Wheatfield, Minnesota, which is basically dying on the vine. The latest book in the Virgil Flowers series is much like the last, a fairly light and breezy entertainment that is neither as dark nor, frankly, as compelling as the earlier entries in the series. The only really negative thing I can say about this is that it may have ruined pot pies for me. When the answers come it’s the kind of logical and satisfying solution that I’d expect from the tight plotting that Sandford does. This time we are completely in the dark as to who is doing the shooting and why until near the end except for one brief chapter in the middle which gives nothing away. Usually we get a lot from the villain’s perspective even if Sandford masks their identity in the writing, and the mystery usually comes from withholding a critical piece that turns out to be the way that Virgil or Lucas Davenport find the bad guy when they figure that out. The difference in this one is that it’s much more of a whodunit than most of Sandford’s other thrillers. Virgil also continues to see his personal life change and grow with a big event on the horizon. There’s a lot of fun characters, and we get a welcome dose of Sandford regulars Shrake and Jenkins. Once again we’ve got Virgil going to a small town to solve a mystery, and he relies on tapping into local gossip more than forensics or Sherlock Holmes style deduction to do it. This is a pretty typical Virgil Flowers novel, and as a John Sandford fan that’s good enough for me. Virgil begins pulling on multiple threads involving various townsfolk, and things quickly escalate.Ĭan Virgil track down the sniper before he finds himself in the crosshairs? Or will he starve to death first since he can’t get a decent meal anywhere in town and has to subsist on chicken pot pies from the convenience store? State investigator Virgil Flowers arrives and tries to figure out why someone would be randomly shooting folks who are just hoping to catch a glimpse of Mary. However, when a sniper wounds two people outside the church at different times it puts the brakes on the new tourism trade. Now Wheatfield is booming thanks to an influx of visitors hoping to see the vision for themselves. Wheatfield, Minnesota, is a dying small town until several apparitions of the Virgin Mary in an old church are captured on video by multiple people and posted on social media. This book asks the ultimate question: How long can a man live eating only frozen chicken pot pies? I received a free copy of this from NetGalley for review. His wife, Susan, died of metastasized breast cancer in May, 2007, and is greatly missed. He has two children, Roswell and Emily, and one grandson, Benjamin. He is the principal financial backer of a major archeological project in the Jordan Valley of Israel, with a website at In addition to archaeology, he is deeply interested in art (painting) and photography. He's also the author of two non-fiction books, one on plastic surgery and one on art. From 1990 to the present he has written thriller novels. Paul Pioneer-Press from 1978-1990 in 1980, he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and he won the Pulitzer in 1986 for a series of stories about a midwestern farm crisis. He was a reporter for The Miami Herald from 1971-78, and then a reporter for the St. Army from 1966-68, worked as a reporter for the Cape Girardeau Southeast Missourian from 1968-1970, and went back to the University of Iowa from 1970-1971, where he received a master's degree in journalism. In 1966, he married Susan Lee Jones of Cedar Rapids, a fellow student at the University of Iowa. He then spent four years at the University of Iowa, graduating with a bachelor's degree in American Studies in 1966. He attended the public schools in Cedar Rapids, graduating from Washington High School in 1962. John Sandford was born John Roswell Camp on February 23, 1944, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
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