Headed to rural Bluestem to assist local law enforcement with the seemingly motiveless murder of an elderly couple, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers happens upon a raging house fire on the edge of town. The house's owner, Bill Judd, killed in the blaze, was an elderly recluse who, back in the day, ran an elaborate pyramid scheme and simultaneously bedded half the women in town. He escaped conviction on the fraud charge, and the money was never recovered. There have been no murders in Bluestem for a half-century, and now there are three in a couple weeks. Virgil is not an advocate of coincidence and so begins digging for a connection between the victims. Complicating matters is his affair with the sister of the local police chief. Sandford's plotting and dialogue are as crisp as ever, and the emergence of Virgil Flowers gives the author another idiosyncratic, thoroughly ingratiating hero to alternate with the ever-popular Lucas Davenport. Flowers, who made his debut as a secondary character in the Davenport thriller Invisible Prey (2007), is a low-key loose cannon whose wardrobe consists of alternative-rock t-shirts carefully chosen to match his agenda of the day. The appeal of the Davenport series is mainly tied to the hero's wit and self-deprecating humor, but this first Flowers entry is more about action: an adrenaline rush peppered with laugh-out-loud moments.

Virgil Flowers, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator introduced as a sidekick to Lucas Davenport in Invisible Prey (2007), gets a death-enriched case of his own. In a little town like Bluestem, everybody knows everybody's business, and what everybody knows these days is that everybody's getting killed. The flagship victim is Bill Judd, 82, the wealthy lawyer/banker/trader who made enemies right and left with a Jerusalem artichoke pyramid scheme 20 years ago. He's an obvious target for the methodical arsonist who burned down his house with him inside. But the other victims are much more inoffensive: ancient physician Russell Gleason and his wife, retired Stark County sheriff Roman Schmidt and his wife. The current sheriff, Jimmy Stryker, doesn't mind working with a BCA type like Virgil. He doesn't even mind the sidelong gazes Virgil casts at his recently divorced sister, Joan Carson. And he brings up his share of promising ideas about the case, which involves money laundering, a meth lab, a surprise claimant to the Judd estate and a truly nasty man of the cloth. But could he be the target of his own manhunt? The advanced age of the victims makes Virgil think that the crimes could have deep roots — maybe as deep as a "man on the moon" party Bill Judd hosted back in 1969. Sadly, it seems to take another 38 years for Virgil and company, making endless rounds of Bluestem to ask really obvious questions, to close the case. The pace is so much slower than when Davenport is in charge that you may wonder if Virgil, a perfectly reasonable hero, is under sedation. It's not until the Acknowledgments, which are deferred till the end of the story, that this last and deepest mystery is cleared up. A high-fatality, low-octane procedural that has its points but lacks the wow factor. Bring back Lucas Davenport.

Virgil Flowers, introduced in bestseller Sandford's Prey series (Invisible Prey, etc.), gets a chance to shine in his own vehicle and does so brightly. The thrice-divorced, affable member of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), who reports to Prey series hero Lucas Davenport, operates pretty much on his own as he tackles a murder wave that hits the little town of Bluestem. At the center of the story is old Bill Judd, hated by many who blame him for the Jerusalem artichoke scheme that made him rich and others poor. Other motives abound as do suspects — including a religious/survivalist cult headed by a felon or some of the many who participated in the long ago orgies Judd orchestrated. Flowers likes to stir things up and see what happens, and plenty does as the killings continue. Sandford keeps the reader guessing and the pages turning while Flowers displays the kind of cool and folksy charm that might force Davenport to share the spotlight more often.