Deadline - John Sandford

As can be guessed from its title, this latest Virgil Flowers' adventure is dealing with the death of a reporter. Virgil lives in Mankato, has a girlfriend with children. His friend, Johnson Johnson, in Trippton, called him for help because dogs in his area had been dognapped. Dogs are people's best friend, so Virgil took it (or tried to take it) seriously.

As a state police, Virgil went around and across Minnesota to work. Now it was in Trippton, in Buchanan County, "in the Driftless Area along the Mississippi River". To make it simple to get his boss's permission, Virgil at this time had some time after solving a case in New Mexico. At the same time, his boss Lucas Davenport, had been busy working on the black hole case-->read John Sandford's Field of Prey. I myself thought Virgil should have been helping his boss than working on this dognapping cases. Of course Virgil never clearly told his boss what he was really up to.

However, in searching for the missing dogs, Virgil found a meth lab and ended up working on murder cases, started with a dead reporter found in a ditch. It turned out the dead reporter had been working on an article about the local school board embezzlement, the biggest in Minnesota history. The school board tried to cover the embezzlement up by murdering the reporter, at first, but more bodies turned up because things were going more wrong and wrong. It was useless, by the way, because Virgil our hero had known about the school board's involvement from the beginning.

The story concluded with Virgil Flowers going home bringing a yellow dog. The latest John Sandford book Uncaged also portrayed the hero/heroin with a dog. Now if Sandford would also give Lucas Davenport a dog, that's a pattern.