Heat Lightning (Virgil Flowers #2)

I like John Sandford, he writes in a pleasing style that makes the pages drift by quickly.

His Lucas Davenport series is first class and something to look forward to always but one can’t write one or two Davenport books a year without burnout so we get Virgil Flowers.

Flowers is a good character who is different to Davenport in a number of ways, perhaps the main ones are that he is single and younger.

In this book, people are dying and having a lemon stuffed into their mouths. Flowers is tasked with finding what this all means and to stop the killing.

The story is quite good as always from Sandford and the climax is interesting, not 100% sure it is that realistic but that is ok, this is fiction.

Of Sandford’s three lead characters in his books, I would rank them in order of quality and believability as Davenport followed by Flowers followed (distantly) by Kidd.

Seems like a few people picked up on the different writing style and minor plotting issues in the first Flowers novel. I personally liked it, but this second flowers book is noticeably better and I’d like to think it could turn around some of the 1-star reviews from his last effort.

We have professional military-type killings, spies with CIA ties, and an interesting backstory from the final days of the Vietnam war. All of this is well done and still feels like Sandford at the helm (even if apparently he has a co-author with the flowers books, and even though the story and characters are a bit outside of Sandford’s usual).

It just shows how well he writes… he does soldiers and spies better than some authors who make this stuff their bread and butter. There are no false notes, everything feels realistic and dramatic right up until the end, where there’s a fairly implausible (but very satisfying) finishing touch, after all the action winds down.

If you still don’t like Flowers books after this one, you can probably safely ignore all of them.

This was an interesting story, although not quite as good as the debut book for the Virgil Flowers series. To try to avoid spoilers, a series of men of about the same age end up executed and a lemon placed in their mouths. The men are from different towns, walks of life – do not have obvious things they share. Their commonality will be the key to finding the murderer. The book is topical, deals important issues within our nation and the scars that have accrued from our shared history.

People are dying. What they have in common reaches back decades and half a world away. Virgil Flowers has his work cut out for him on this case as no one is who they seem to be. I wasn’t sure who were the victims and who was perpetrating the crimes and apparently Virgil wasn’t either. It was a good story line and in the second book of the Virgil Flowers series I’m getting to know him and even like him. All quite readable and enjoyable to the end. Being from the Midwest but now living in New England I find the use of the setting effective. I’ve seen the rain move in and can almost smell the storm coming as Sanford writes it.

Sandford continues his unbroken string of superbly written novels. His plots are sometimes intricate, but never unbelievable. Sandford’s characters are realistic (if always successful!), without coming across as supermen/superwomen. Since the much regretted death of Elmore Leonard, I think Sandford and Burke are the finest story tellers writing in English today. And Sandford has the advantage in managing to include an element of humor in his plots and characters.

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