Bad Blood (Virgil Flowers Series #4)

by John Sandford

Overview

Two bodies in two days. One is murder. The other is suicide. Virgil Flowers never imagined that discovering the connection would lead him into the perverse history of the Minnesota farm community, and almost unimaginable darkness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101443439
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/27/2011
Series:	Virgil Flowers Series , #4
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	2,560
File size:	554 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist John Sandford is the author of the Prey series, four Kidd novels and the Virgil Flowers series. He lives in Minnesota. Visit www.johnsandford.org for more information.

Hometown:

St. Paul, Minnesota

Date of Birth:

February 23, 1944

Place of Birth:

Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Education:

State University of Iowa, Iowa City: B.A., American History; M.A., Journalism

Website:

http://www.johnsandford.org

Editorial Reviews

The first homicide was easy to solve: A beating death that the teenage murderer tried to pass off as a fatal grain elevator accident. Beyond that, each case gets tougher, but Minnesota sleuth Virgil Flowers doesn't stop until a widespread conspiracy involving town leaders is exposed.

When 19-year-old Bob Tripp hits farmer Jacob Flood in the head with a T-ball bat at the outset of Sandford's exciting fourth thriller to feature Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agent Virgil Flowers (after Rough Country), Tripp's subsequent attempt to make murder look like an accident fails. The morning after Tripp's arrest, he's found hanging in his cell. Warren County sheriff Lee Coakley seeks Flowers's help to investigate what role, if any, deputy Jim Crocker, the officer on duty at the jail at the time, played in Tripp's death. A link to the earlier murder of a young woman leads Flowers and Coakley to members of a small church with strange ways. As the pair become aware of the magnitude of the unspeakable crimes (rape, child abuse, incest) behind the deaths, they search desperately for a lever to pry open what turns out to be Flowers's biggest, if perhaps most unlikely, case to date. Author tour. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

An open-and-shut case of murder leads Virgil Flowers, of Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (Rough Country, 2009, etc.),to a twisted, century-old conspiracy.

Despite his efforts to pass off Jacob Flood's death as an accident, it's no secret that Robert Tripp, 19, killed the farmer with a baseball bat. The wounds that were supposed to have disabled Flood had obviously been inflicted after death, and Bobby all but confessed to Warren County Sheriff Lee Coakley. But the case turned darker the night that Coakley arrested her suspect, whose apparent suicide in his cell is pretty clearly murder as well. Jim Crocker, the overnight deputy who was supposed to guard the prisoner but who killed him instead, didn't kill himself, since despite a death scene staged to suggest that he ate his gun, it's obvious to a trained investigator like Virgil Flowers that Crocker was enjoying the favors of a female visitor only a few seconds before he departed this life. As if three murders weren't enough, Virgil swiftly, if intuitively, ties them to a fourth: the sexual violence that claimed the life of high-school student Kelly Baker, who was found naked, violated, but conscientiously scrubbed clean of DNA 14 months ago in a cemetery just across the Iowa border. Once Virgil's begun to question everyone in the town of Battenberg, he's immediately struck by the involvement of so many of the town's citizens—from the parents who home-schooled Kelly Baker and insist that their daughter had no time for boys, to Emmett Einstadt, Jacob Flood's monumentally creepy father-in-law—in the World of Spirit, a Bible-based church that follows a very different path to salvation than Virgil's father, a Lutheran minister, ever preached. The mystery, which is resolved early on, leads to an extended series of cat-and-mouse games between Virgil and the people he knows are guilty of some truly heinous crimes.

Lurid and overscaled.

Kirkus Reviews