listened to on Audible
read by Eric Conger
2016, GP Putnam's Sons
400 pgs.
Adult Murder Mystery
Finished 8/24/17
Goodreads rating: 4.21 - 10,751 ratings
My ra ting: 4.5
Setting: Contemporary Minnesota
First line/s: "Peck popped a Xanax, screwed the top back on the pill tube, peered over the top of the bush and through the chain-link fence, and in a hoarse whisper asked, "You see the other one?"
My comments:
| Viva Virgil Flowers! My favorite serial good guy. Eric Conger is definitely the voice of Virgil Flowers. Add in John Sandford, who created Virgil, and you have a perfect trinity. I could listen to Virgil problem-solving and telling about his escapades for days on end. The beginning of this (book 9 in the series) started out just a tiny bit slowly. However, I didn't despair because I knew it would get more interesting quickly. Yup. There were two main plot lines happening - a personal one involving Virgil's girlfriend, Frankie and her sister; and one involving his job as the head investigator into the robbery/kidnapping of two endangered tiers from the Minnesota Zoo. Both got stickier and stickier and it's Virgil's job to keep his head above water and his paces closer and closer to the perpetrators. Good reading | ||
Goodreads synopsis: Whenever you hear the sky rumble, that usually means a storm. In Virgil Flowers’ case, make that two. The exceptional new thriller from the writer whose books are “pure reading pleasure” (Booklist)
The first storm comes from, of all places, the Minnesota zoo. Two large, and very rare, Amur tigers have vanished from their cage, and authorities are worried sick that they’ve been stolen for their body parts. Traditional Chinese medicine prizes those parts for home remedies, and people will do extreme things to get what they need. Some of them are a great deal more extreme than others -- as Virgil is about to find out.
Then there’s the homefront. Virgil’s relationship wi th his girlfriend Frankie has been getting kind of serious, but when Frankie’s sister Sparkle moves in for the summer, the situation gets a lot more complicated. For one thing, her research into migrant workers is about to bring her up against some very violent people who emphatically do not want to be researched. For another…she thinks Virgil’s kind of cute.
“You mess around with Sparkle,” Frankie told Virgil, “you could get yourself stabbed.”
“She carries a knife?”
“No, but I do.”
Forget a storm – this one’s a tornado.
