Bad Blood - John Sandford

The previous book in this Virgil Flowers series, Rough Country, was quite disappointing (Heat Lightning, the book before Rough Country, was not spectacular either); so I prepared myself for the same quality when I began the next book: Bad Blood. However, this one turned out to be good. From the first chapter it successfully drew my attention and interest.

A 19 year-old boy, a good kid, killed a farmer in Homestead, in Warren County, Minnesota. The boy died in jail after being arrested, most likely killed by a deputy who guarded him in the night. Then, the deputy died in his own house. The (female) sheriff asked Virgil Flowers to look at the case, because the late deputy had run against her in the previous election and everybody believed that his death was a suicide.

Homestead was an old country town with appr. fourteen thousand people, so Flowers quickly linked the three murders to the death of a 17 year-old Kelly Baker, even though she was murdered across the line in Iowa a year ago. In small towns, murders are rare (not like what we can see from TV news every day) and people would remember and still talk about it.

The pace of the story was good. Flowers' investigation gained progress and development. In the end, Flowers had to face a kind of sect who used Bib1e to justify their actions: abusing kids, and this had been going on for many years, for several generations. This was a rare moment where the bad guys were so many.