3 stars.
Another swell outing with that effing Flowers. Plot summary can be wrapped up short & sweet: 3 young killers on a crime spree in Minnesota with much more to the story than just that! Good interaction between the kids & Virgil that is interesting and reveals quite a bit about him as well as them.
Sandford is still solid and the story swept along with only a few missteps.
One weird phone call to his mom that had me scratching my head-does Virgil kiss his mom with that mouth? There was a closer look at Virgil’s dad that sort of put Virgil into perspective. I enjoyed the fleshing out of their family back story a little bit.
The main plot was good-choppy vignettes of violent action interspersed with humor here & there. There are good cops, bad cops, hot chicks, beatings, sexual ‘stuff’, car chases, introspection and a nice plot device to look inside the killers’ minds. Sandford writes like a slow moving train: you know where you’re going with this engineer & conductor but the weird scenery along the way is always changing!
The one main thing that dropped my rating to 3:
There was a min plot twist near the end that had me shaking my head WTHeck? I felt like Sandford had a really good idea for a story but it didn’t fit a Davenport story, wasn’t enough for a standalone book and really didn’t match Virgil but with a little tweaking it could maybe-kind of-sort of-a little bit, fit into this book?
Not a 4/5 star by any means but a decent 3 star read. Looking forward to the next one in the series.