Bloody Genius

The ‘also by’ page in this new book by John Sandford runs to two columns and actually fills the page. Luckily for us, Sandford is still producing at a considerable rate, with most years seeing a new Lucas Davenport thriller as well as a fresh investigation from Virgil Flowers. Davenport is now a US Marshal while Flowers works for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

As the ‘Prey’ suffix for all the Davenport titles suggests, those books are more about manhunts, sometimes womanhunts, in which the identity of the villains is usually clear from the start. With the Flowers series, Sandford reverts to more traditional whodunit territory, often concealing the villain and throwing suspicion this way and that before a final reveal.

So it is with Bloody Genius, the twelfth Flowers. In the beginning a medical professor, Barthelemy Quill, is clubbed to death in the University of Minnesota library, apparently with his own computer. There are no clues, no trace of the ‘weapon’, no DNA, but plenty of suspects. Quill was a controversial academic, with several exes, an ongoing feud with members of another university faculty, possible involvement with drugs as well as being complicit in dodgy surgical procedures.

Virgil, hooked up with his partner Frankie (expecting twins) and living on her farm, is a bit domesticated these days, and his head is not turned, or not turned much, by a couple of the attractive female suspects. As ever, Sandford shows his skill in sketching character, whether lawyers, librarians, slackers or highway patrolmen, in a couple of lines of description and a few words of dialogue. Virgil Flowers, witty, decent, easy-going, is an engaging companion, maybe more so than the sometimes hard-nosed Davenport.

Among other encounters Virgil befriends an old guy in a bar who tells him that, since he’s already met the whole cast of characters, he’s already met the villain. Virgil tells him that real life isn’t like that but, of course, it is and he has. There are other Christie-like touches, as when Frankie helps work out the solution to the mystery with the aid of a traditional board game. At the end it turns out that Virgil has been working on a novel. Maybe one day he’ll write about his own cases. In the meantime, John Sandford is a tremendous substitute.