Book Report: Rough Country by John Sandford (2009)

This is a Virgil Flowers book, so it differs from the Davenport series as it’s more focused on a single guy out there trying to solve a mystery. In this particular case, it’s an advertising agency woman visiting a resort in the northern part of Minnesota who gets shot in the face while canoeing. The resort is women-only, kind of as a retreat from men, and draws a lot of lesbians. And some of them interact with the locals, including a lesbian folk singer with a menacing father and mentally different brother. As a result, Flowers plods along for 200 or so pages as Sandford lays it out and then starts to solving it in the next couple hundred pages.

The later Sandford books seem to take on this sort of pattern. Complications for 200 pages, starting to make progress for 150 pages, then resolution. As it’s a Flowers book, it also features a wide collection of band t-shirts that Flowers wears and sexual escapades or, in this book, tension.

And it’s not a Sandford book without the occasional clangs of wrongness. This book has two that stick with me: one where a couple bring in a small gadget and explain it’s an intercom that alerts them if their baby awakens. That’s called a baby monitor perhaps everywhere but Minneapolis. Secondly, when the sinister father talks about his daughter getting caught up in musical dreams, he refers to CMTV. Whereas it is Country Music Television, the tag and call signs are CMT. Maybe Sandford wants to show he’s out of touch. Given Sandford’s history of these sorts of boners, though, he should probably keep from that sort of subtlety.

It’s a pretty good book, a bit long, and it doesn’t drop in too many things from the killer’s perspective, although he does rely on it once. It’s a laziness in writing as are hitting the common series tropes. He’s not devolved too much here.

Oh, and he’s also laid off the Republicans for the most part, maybe because the book was written in that golden period between the election and the effects of the administration. He can’t lay off of Fox News entirely, though, but it’s easily bypassed since it doesn’t crop up every thirty pages like in Wicked Prey.