Shock Wave (Virgil Flowers #5)

I am a psychologist. I spend a lot of time reading and weighting about very difficult situations in which people find themselves. One way that I turn my mind off at the end of the day is by reading popular fiction. I don’t need high art about which I can have erudite conversations. I need well written, fast paced stories which serve as a distraction from my day to day life.

In the past year my favorite author, for the purpose of leisure reading, has been John Sandford. I enjoy both the intricate plots and psychological aspects of his novels. Of the dozen or so I have read so far, Shock Wave is my favorite. It contains the perfect combination of murder, intrigue, and mystery. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.

.The Virgil Flowers Series by John Sandford
Id read all Sandfords Prey novels then decided to order the most recently released Virgil Flowers one. That lead to my ordering all the rest of this series. After theyd all arrived, I put them in publication order. Beginning with the first of the series,I began a John Sandfords Virgil Flowers series reading marathon. If youre a mystery/thriller fan youve probably read Sandford and know what to expect. Excellent character development, good descriptions of people and places, interesting story lines, plots with twists and turns, real life, although not for the sensitive to vulgarity, conversations and page-turning, have to see what happens next stories. Rather than get into the storyline of each book in the series, since so many other reviews have already done that, I think that pretty much says it all. The one thought I had after completing each one wasHow does he come up with all these different story lines? If you like reading mystery/thriller books, I highly recommend John Sandford.

Part of me shies away from giving a book a 5-star rating, since when I think of a 5-star book, I think of “To Kill a Mockingbird”, “Dune”, the Bible, etc. But Amazon’s interpretation of a 5-star rating is “I love it” (as opposed to “I like it” for 4 stars), so I’m giving every Virgil Flowers novel 5 stars ’cause I just love ole Virgil. Virgil is the antithesis of his boss Lucas Davenport in pretty much every way, with his surfer-blonde hair, trailing his boat behind his pickup whenever he heads out to a crime scene, and half the time forgetting to get his gun out from under the seat when he gets there. Don’t get me wrong, I still love and read Lucas’ books, but he is getting on in years, married now and with a kid, and ole Virgil is a breath of fresh air. Lucas handles the big-ticket, big-city murders where everything is on the line, at the same time calling up Virgil when he gets a call for help from some sheriff waaaaay out in the boonies. Virgil doesn’t care…when he gets there, he will probably find an obscure diner with great homemade pie and a lonely waitress, and there is probably a dandy musky lake hidden not far from the murder scene. No wonder ole Virgil is always willing to run off chasing Lucas’ castoff killers…:)

Virgil Flowers considers himself a “shitkicker” and tends to dress, talk, and act like one, favoring T-shirts from rock bands, cowboy boots, fly fishing, fast motorboats, and, shall we say, casual language. Here he is in conversation with one of his suspects in Shock Wave, a trade school instructor:

Virgil: “So, where you at?”

Suspect: “You don’t need the `at’ at the end of that sentence. If you’d asked, `Where are you?’ that would have been fine.”

Virgil: “I’m colloquial.”

Virgil sometimes uses words like “colloquial” because, in reality, he has a college degree (in ecological science) and a scary-high IQ, and, though everyone seems to comment that he looks nothing like a cop, he is the most successful detective in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprensioin (BCA).

In Shock Wave, the fifth in John Sanders’ Virgil Flowers series, Virgil is sent to investigate a fatal bombing at the site of a future big-box store that is carefully positioned not to be a Wal-Mart even though it clearly is. There, he encounters the founder of the Wal-Mart-like chain, an irascible old man with a million-dollar secretary and $32 billion net work, along with the mayor and members of the city council of a small town in the far reaches of Minnesota. As the novel’s first bombing is followed by a second and then, in quick succession, another, Virgil and the local sherrif race to identify the bomber — and, along the way, come to grips with the corruption on the city council that gave the green light for the store to be built.

John Sandford is a master of novels like this. In addition to the Virgil Flowers series, he has published 21 entries in the “Prey” series featuring Virgil’s boss, Lucas Davenport, 4 more in another short-lived crime series, plus two unrelated novels and a couple of nonfiction books as well — starting in 1988. If your skills run more to language than to mathematics, please note that Sandford (a pseudonym for a former Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist) has been writing an average of about 1-1/2 books per year. Others are more prolific, but Sandford’s plots are invariably inventive, his characters three-dimensional, and his prose eminently readable.

My first Virgil Flowers book and I enjoyed it. It seems to meander along slowly, pretty much like Flowers himself but there are strokes of pure genius in the way the book develops. Flowers seems to be a bit slow and not very intelligent but he has a way of getting down to what is important and figuring it all out in an unusual manner. I can often work out ” who dunit” half way through a book but I couldn’t guess this one until it waa revealed. Will definitely read more.

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