After reading Lucas Davenport’s latest novel “Prey” by John Sanford, I vowed never to read another of his books again. What can I say? I am weak and desperate. There just isn’t a lot of good reading out there, so when I saw “Rough County” I decided to take a chance. It’s good!
I think Sanford made the right decision when he cut Virgil Flowers from the team on the Davenport books. Lucas Davenport has become tame and, well, boring. Virgil, on the other hand, is young, smart, a cute surfer, and a good cop. He drives a truck with his aluminum boat hooked to the back, in case he decides to go fishing, and frequently loses his gun. He is a girl mogul which makes this story really funny. It is about a murder that occurs in a women’s shelter in northern Minnesota, and many of the women are lesbians.
Poor Virgil is on vacation fishing with his friend, Johnson Johnson (really!) when Davenport calls him and asks him to break his vacation to investigate a murder at Eagle’s Nest. A woman was paddling around the lake and someone shot her in the head. Virgil begins to investigate and comes across more than one suspect. The dead woman, Erica, had a brief affair with Wendy, the lead singer of a girl band. Berni aka Raven, Wendy’s main girlfriend was not very happy to hear that news. Virgil puts her on his suspect list. Then there’s Ruth, Erica’s life partner. Did she know about the hanky-panky at the hostel? The list of suspects becomes long and interesting.
The beginning of the book is fast-paced and very funny. Sanford has a knack for creating colorful yet believable characters. Halfway through, he knew who the killer was and was pretty sure of the big plot twist. Toward the end, the pace slowed, until at page 350 he was flipping through. Too many details, obvious padding. I know the book would have been better, tighter and with fewer pages. I have another picky eater. One of the key characters was Wendy’s father, whose name is Slibe. Now, I have no idea how to pronounce this name: one word SLIBE or two SLI-BE? Therefore, whenever I came across this name, and it was frequent, I would stop to try to figure out the pronunciation! As an author, you do NOT want to do that because every time you stop a reader, there’s a chance they won’t start again!
Overall, I enjoyed the book in part because I grew up in Minnesota and am somewhat familiar with the territory and characters. “Rough Country” is a quick read despite its length and I highly recommend it.
