Heat Lightning (Virgil Flowers)

Another great Sanford novel! I have been a big fan through all the Prey books. This new guy ROCKS! I love how this still ties in with Davenport, but gives us a new direction.

I am trying to figure out if I would like these books more if I hadn't read the Davenport series first. It just feels to me that Virgil is Lucas light. There isn't a substantive difference between the two, and Virgil, frankly, isn't as smart as Davenport. I saw the 'twist' at the end, coming a mile off, and it annoyed me that Virgil didn't. The person with the most detectiing capacity in this book was Lucas's old friend the Nun.

The plot centers around 2 men who are killed and displayed conspicuously at war memorial sites with a lemon in their mouth. Virgil is told of a Vietnam connection and the rest of the book is spent figuring out a) who is going to be killed next and b) why are they being killed. I didn't mind them being killed but the collatoral damage seemed rather high.

So, Sandford is always readable but this is definitely a second tier outing for me. A library loan, not a keeper...

The Prey series has always been one of my favorites, and Sandford gets credit for allowing Davenport to mature in age and career. In this book, the main character Virgil Flowers is very different from Davenport, who appears pretty much as a supporting 'actor'. Virgil is a portrayed as someone I think I'll grow to like quite a bit.

The plot is interesting, the book is hard to put down. Isn't Sandford's BEST, but it's quite good.

A familiar setting freshened nicely with the continued development of a new protagonist, Virgil Flowers.

Few authors are capable of creating an enduring, human-like character that continues to grow in one novel after another. John Sanford did it with Lucas Davenport, the generally cynical investigator for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), a real agency by the way.

Readers have been privileged to sort of pal around with Davenport as he investigated crimes, many of them quite grisly, around the State of Minnesota, from the very cosmopolitan Twin Cities to the very backwoodsy Iron Range to the flat southern part of the state. We've been shot at with Davenport, avoided knife wounds (most of the time), come uncomfortably close to violent death all too often and had our throat sliced open in a life saving maneuver by the crime victim who became Davenport' wife.

Over the last few novels, we've been growing old with Davenport as well. It's been harder to keep up with young criminals. Can't run as far or as fast as we once did. Can't keep going for days on no sleep and only a candy bar to eat.

So the torch has been increasingly more often to a younger generation of crimestoppers, guys like Virgil Flowers. Flowers is definitely offbeat and eccentric, about two steps further round the corner than Davenport. Maybe three.

First introduced in one of Sanford's twenty "Prey" novels featuring Davenport, Virgil Flowers has grown from a bit part player to a full fledged character. His first solo trip into the world was in "Dark of the Moon", which was good. It was also rumored to be written in large part by someone else.

In "Heat Lightening", Virgil Flowers comes entirely into his own as a character. Flowers is now capable of standing on his own - and stand he does. Stands tall as a matter of fact.

Flowers lives in Mankato, a kind of nifty college / agribusiness / manufacturing town in southern Minnesota. No matter though since Davenport has Flowers skittering hither and thither all about the state, causing him to place head upon the pillow in lots of no-star motels. Flowers has a penchant for wearing T-shirts, jeans and no gun. An attractive man to the ladies, he has been married three times and, occasionally, shares a bed with one of his more colorful ex-wives.

That is, in fact, where we find the perennially sleep deprived Flowers when Davenport calls to set him on the road of solving another murder, the corpse being rasther ceremoniously dumped at a veterans memorial. (Almost every Minnesota town has a memorial to the brave Minnesotans who gave their lives to preserve and protect the freedoms John Sanford and the rest of us Americans enjoy. Occasionally Sanford weaves a remark into his narrative makes one question his politics - and the need for them in his otherwise superb novels.)

The murder victim is, uh, dead - and quickly connected with other recently murdered dead across the state. The lemon wedged into their mouths is a clue.

In addition to creating brilliantly wrought fictional characters, Sanford is also an artiste at creating highly intricate plots that have many a twist and turn and this is no exception. (In an acknowledgement, Sanford thanks his "old friend and hunting partner" Chuck Logan for his cooperation in writing "Heat Lightening". What "written in cooperation" means is not spelled out. Frankly, I don't care because "Heat Lightening" is a fine book.)

All the dead seem to be Vietnam war veterans, but maybe not. We are introduced to the killers early on, a Sanford trademark, but Flowers, of course, must find them on his on. The dots soon begin to connect. The theft of heavy construction equipment from Vietnam in 1975. A left-wing radical from the era, a college professor, who suddenly relocates from Madison, Wisconsin to St. Paul, Minnesota. His beautiful half-Vietnamese daughter. A biker who doesn't want to be found. And a couple of more guys showing up dead at veterans memorials.

Sanford, as always, gets off to a fast start and never slows down. Davenport recedes almost entirely into the background in "Heat Lightning", making only rare appearances as the boss. For the most part, Flowers is on his own.

As is often the case in a Sanford novel, the action flows across the State of Minnesota. Primary and secondary characters are crisply drawn and so very human, you want to sit down and have coffee with them. At least the nice guys among them. The villains are nice people to, sort of, always morally ambiguous in Sanford's way. Nice to those they like or favor in some way - and deadly to those they don't. Sometimes a person can go from favored to dead in an instant.

There's a real richness to Virgil Flowers in this book. He is literally out there in full bloom.

The plot is marvelous and has several untelegraphed, unexpected twists. "Heat Lightning" is that most delightful phenomena, as real page turner. It is fast reading, but expect it to keep you up late for a couple of nights.

Sadly, Sanford feels compelled to show us that he is a member of the left-wing "America is bad" brigade on a couple of occasions. Mercifully, they are brief and have little impact on the story.

Excellent reading for the police procedural and thriller fan.

Jerry