Meet Virgil Flowers: He's Not John Sandford's Usual Prey
The most recent installment in the long-running ... Prey series by John Sandford, Invisible Prey, introduced the closest thing to a surfer-boy Minnesota's seen since the last Beach Boys tour. Virgil Flowers may be a gun-totin' cop (at least once in a while), but he looks, dresses, and acts a lot more like a road-weary drifter than your stereotypical bullet-headed Raybanned badge-wearer. Maybe he does usually dress in jeans and a tee shirt advertising a rock band (ranging from the Stones to Arcade Fire, which Virgil pronounces "the world's best hurdy-gurdy band"); maybe he's been married and divorced more times than most Hollywood actors (three of each in five years); and maybe his hair's better suited to a redneck bar than a cop car - but Lucas Davenport has pretty much given him carte blanche as a field investigator for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. It seems that Flowers gets bored easily, so Davenport only assigns him to the hard ones.
This time, the hard one is out in the little town of Bluestem, near the South Dakota border on I-90. Even as Virgil arrives in town, though, he comes upon another hard one; for a total of three octogenarians brutally murdered in the small town over a few days. It takes just a few questions to figure out a good reason for that third death - the richest man in town had made a lot of enemies over the years, having piled up a lot of cash at the expense of some of his neighbors - but the original two murders don't seem so cut and dried. Virgil's investigation yields some interesting tales of life out in the toolies during the sixties, a place much more similar to Peyton Place than people on the east side of the Hudson might think. The current generation may think they invented gratuitous sex, but they might be surprised at the youthful antics of people who are now in their fifties. You've got your threesomes, your group gropes, your drugs, your love children. Ooooh, la, la...
It's hard to get away with multiple murders in a small town, where everyone knows everyone else's business, but clues are few and far between and the town's substantial collection of busybodies has nothing to add. Virgil, perhaps a little distracted by the presence of what he considers "the fourth best ass in Minnesota," makes little headway. Might be a connection to a white supremacist preacher just across the line in SoDak, might be long-smoldering hatred over something from forty years ago. Might be something entirely different: but you can bet that Virgil Flowers is gonna stir things up until something floats to the surface.
It shouldn't come as any surprise that John Sandford's seventy-three-million book ... Prey series (OK, just seventeen, at least so far) has borne a bouncing, 373-page spinoff. After all, it's been running for years, and spinoffs of long-running series are a pretty common in the land of the boob tube sitcom. You know, "All in the Family" generated "The Jeffersons"; and "Happy Days" spawned "Laverne and Shirley" followed by "Mork and Mindy." Seems that, as a general rule, the spinoff is but a shadow of the original (though it's hard to tell with "Happy Days" as a parent, if you ask me). Perhaps this explains why fans of the Prey series seem pretty much united in their disdain for Flowers, at least so far. Perhaps not.
I'm not a fan of the Prey series; in fact, I don't think I've read even one. But Dark of the Moon is clearly not going to win any prizes for innovation. Flowers is about as far as you can get from a noir detective - amiable instead of a prickly loner; a thirty-something into alt rock instead of as fifty-something into heroin jazz; more inclined to leave his weapon under the seat of the SUV than stare down its barrel, if only metaphorically. But he still falls into some of the other stereotypes we've come to expect from Spillane and his ilk, especially in the near-instantaneous bed-down and ultimate departure of the love interest. Flowers still seems pretty fresh, at least as long as you're not particularly familiar with the likes of Elvis Cole or Thorne. But Flowers is pretty much the only character in the novel who's very well-developed (with the obvious exception of Joan Stryker, who possesses that "fourth-best..."), and the rest are more stereotypes than anything else. Sure, Flowers is uproariously funny with all that self-deprecating wit, but can he stand up for the long haul? I wonder...
What I found least likable about Sandford's novel, though, wasn't the predictability of the first bedroom scene or the thin nature of many of the characters. What I disliked most was a long digression from the plot that took up seventy pages or so right in the middle. A slam-bang action scene, to be sure, but only peripherally related to the mystery and seemingly added more to give the book some heft than anything else. When the action finally returned to the murder mystery, it seemed somehow almost anticlimactic, and the plot never got back on course.
Sandford's given readers a new protagonist in this Lucas Davenport spinoff, but he'd better let Virgil Flowers do some growing on his own. We've all seen how die-hard fans of a series get grumpy whenever their "favorite author" lets a protagonist lie fallow for a book, and fans of the Prey books are no different. If Flowers is to be able to stand alone, then the next time out Sandford had better give him a better vehicle (and I don't mean an F-150 instead of his 4Runner)