Enjoyable Crime Capers
Lucas Davenport is Virgil Flowers’s boss. John Sandford has given both their own series of books, and the two make guest appearances in each other’s stories. That’s the reason for writing about two books by the same author, Gathering Prey starring Davenport (the latest in the Prey series) and Deadline with Flowers.
They are both crime fighters—Davenport is a family man (after philandering through many early Prey novels) of independent means, and a penchant for fashionable designer clothes; a maverick for whom him his job is a passion. Flowers is a roughneck with multiples marriages behind him and is currently in a happy relationship with a woman who has many children by different fathers. Both books are hugely entertaining, the Flowers’ one more so, because of the crackling dialogue—the exchanges between Flowers and his buddy Johnson Johnson (same first and last name) are hilarious.
Virgil Flowers is a tall guy with blond hair, dressed in jeans and vintage band T-shirts, with a sharp mind and a laidback air. He is awakened at an inconvenient hour by a call from his buddy Johnson, reporting the theft of his friend’s dogs. It is one of a series of dognappings in bucolic Trippton, which has upset the people of the town, who think of their canines as family.
When Flowers lands up to help Johnson and his friends as a favour, he hopes to get time to go fishing, but the seemingly peaceful town is seething with crime. Without meaning to look under the rocks, Flowers finds a drug gang cooking meth in the hills, and a local journalist is found dead with bullets in his back.“You got a colorful town here,” he observes to the locals who want to form a posse and hunt down the dog snatchers (who sell their beloved pets for medical research).
In the very first chapter, the reader knows who stole the dogs; it is also revealed that the members of the local school board had the journalist killed, because he was about to reveal their financial scams. The fun is in keeping up with Flowers’s investigations and seeing how he solves all the crimes and ties up loose ends with a neat bow.
Up in the hills, Virgil befriends a street smart 12-year-old, rifle-toting kid called Muffy (he deserves a series of his own), who sees more than is good for him, and finds a feisty old lady as well as a young woman described as the “town prostitute” more than willing to give him the information he seeks. Lucas Davenport does his boss duty on the phone. The body count rises, and leads to an action-packed climax.
Deadline is the eighth book in the Virgil Flowers series, written with obvious relish and affection for the many lowlifes of small town Minnesota. John Sandford is the pseudonym of John Roswell Camp, who, as a journalist won the Pulitzer Prize 1986 for a series of stories titled Life on the Land: An American Farm Family. He is the author of 35 novels and two nonfiction books many of them bestsellers—it’s not hard to see why.
Deadline
by John Sandford
Published by Putnam
Pages: 388
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In Deadline, Virgil Flowers describes his boss, Lucas Davenport, as “not a bad guy, though a trifle intense.”
Davenport who works for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (beat that CID!) that keeps him more than busy. He loves dressing, and drives swish cars, obviously not paid for by his cop’s salary.Gathering Prey is Sandford’s 25th Prey novel and from all accounts among the better ones.
His life is chugging along with routine crime when his adopted daughter Letty comes to him for help with two Traveler she has made friends with. Travelers are bands of people who live like gypsies, always on the move and making a little money busking, petty crime or dope-peddling.
A young woman, Skye, has called Letty in a panic to tell her about the disappearance of her boyfriend, Henry. She believes that a psycho called Pilate may have killed Henry. Pilate is a maniac who travels around with a band of ‘disciples’ who torture and kill people for fun—mostly homeless people, whose deaths nobody cares about.
Lucas and Letty launch a search for Pilate as they discover that he is a killer of the notorious Charles Manson variety. The chase involves cops from many towns and precincts—Virgil Flowers included--as Pilate and his gang hang around Juggalo Gatherings—Juggaloes being fans of the hip hop music group Insane Clown Posse, and wear clown make-up at their music meets called Gatherings in various towns across America.
Pilate is smart, deadly and one step ahead of the cops—he kills without a qualm and hold his followers in a tight grip. It turns out that his girlfriend Kristen has more spunk than he does, but the breathless chase takes Lucas and Letty from one town to another, endangering their own lives to prevent more brutal murders. The pre-climactic shootout is like an edge-of-the seat scene in a film, so vividly does Sandford describe the landscape and the people caught in Pilate’s web. Twenty-five books in the series and still going strong…
Gathering Prey
by John Sandford
Published by Putnam
Pages: 416
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