Mad River by John Sandford

#6 in the Virgil Flowers thread.

Jimmy Sharp. Becky Walsh. Tom McCall. Modern day Bonnie and Clyde and that third guy. A prominent doctor's wife goes to her high school reunion splashing around a killer diamond necklace. Jimmy, Becky, and Tom are dead broke and decide to burgle the lady's home for the jewelry. Jimmy goes right in through an unlocked window, but it goes bad and he kills Agatha O'Leary when she freaks. In the process of escaping, Jimmy kills a guy for his car and they are now on the run. In the process, they kill Jimmy's dad, Becky's parents, a cop during a Credit Union robbery, and commit a number of other random acts of senseless violence. 

Virgil, an investigator for Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (and works for Lucas Davenport-the lead character in Sandford's Prey series), heads for rural southwestern Minnesota where he has to work with Bare County's Sheriff Duke, a Boss Hog kind of cop with a stranglehold on law enforcement on his corner of the prairie. Virgil wants to take the three alive, but Sheriff Duke would just as soon blow them away in retaliation for the murder spree across his beloved county. He and Virgil operate under an uneasy alliance. 

The county cops, with help from neighboring counties and the National Guard, are all trying to track Jimmy, Becky, and Tom to keep them from killing again and possibly getting away. The problem is geometry. A=2(pi)r means that if they've gone 40 miles, the good guys have nearly 250 square miles to search.

Only puzzling thing is that window. How did Jimmy know that particular window would be open? Was the necklace the real target?

Virgil criss crosses the SW corner and the state trying to get some slight edge on the three.

Sandford is one of the most consistent authors out there, offering nearly equal time for Flowers and the 3-on-a-spree. His Prey series is up to 24 books and you don't get that amount of books out there if you aren't any good. I have read only 1 Prey novel and didn't want to like it too much so I wouldn't feel obligated to read the entire series. But, I have read the Kidd series and I think this is my 3rd Virgil Flowers book. This was real easy to get into and before I knew it, I had read 100 pages. The presentation is deliciously readable. Flowers has just enough small town, folksy familiarity with the region that I couldn't help but see a little of Elmore Leonard's Raylen Givens (of the FX TV show 'Justified') as he questions locals who pretend to be bikers 'in a hygenic Minnesota sort of manner.' I know West Coast Don was sort of cool to his venture in an earlier Virgil Flowers novel, but I found this one easily sucked me in right until the the last line. For me, a satisfying escape.

East Coast Don