Browsing Area Book of the Week, April 15, 2013.

Shock Wave by John Sandford. Library Call Number: PS3569.A516S54 2011.
          They’re building a PyeMart in the small river town of Butternut Falls, Minnesota and many people are unhappy about it.  Environmentalists say the run-off from the parking lot and the building site will pollute the pristine river, the local merchants see themselves being put out of business by the megastore. So when a bomb goes off at the trailer of the construction site’s foreman, killing him,  the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension calls in their ace investigator, Virgil Flowers, canceling his vacation and telling him to find out who’s responsible.     
       Three weeks earlier, a bomb had gone off at PyeMart’s executive headquarters, narrowly missing the company’s Executive Board and killing a worker. No one can figure out how the bomb was even placed in the penthouse meeting room.
          Arriving in Butternut Falls, Flowers has to contend with a lot of suspects, the high-powered President of PyeMart, his Executive Secretary, unhelpful city officials and residents, and some truly strange individuals. Before it’s over he will lose his boat and (perhaps worse) nearly his life.
          In Sandford’s books, sometimes you know the bad guy, sometimes it’s a mystery.  This is one of the truly good mysteries in his series of nearly forty books.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, April 25, 2011.

Bad Blood by John Sandford. Library Call number: PS3569.A516 B33 2010.      

          This novel features Flowers investigating a murder in southern Minnesota that looks, at first glance, fairly open and shut. A soybean farmer is found buried in the beans at a grain elevator. It doesn’t take long to see the accident was staged, and only a few hours more before the elevator employee, arrested on suspicion, is found murdered in his cell. His murder looks like the work of a sheriff’s deputy, a close friend of the farmer; when the deputy turns up dead at home, a third murder--this one made to look like suicide--Virgil has a trio to clear up. He finds they all seem to be tied to the recent, vicious rape and murder of a young girl from the area and to a strange religious cult.
          Sandford’s novels always move at a breakneck speed and this one will keep you up late, trying to fit in one more chapter in before sleep.