He sees Trippton’s battered trailer homes, the live pit bulls and dead cars in the yards and the no-trespassing signs at the gates, along with all the signs of misery other regional authors record in their novels. “You guys are the most interesting feds, no doubt about it,” he marvels after their wildcat raid on the meth lab.ĭespite Virgil’s casual air, Sandford’s humor isn’t flip. agents who love a good takedown as much as Virgil. This means calling in the cavalry, a group of cowboy D.E.A. And to add yet another complication to this insane plot, while Virgil and Johnson Johnson are up in the hills searching for the doomed dogs, they walk smack into a well-equipped commercial meth lab. “You got a colorful town here,” Virgil says admiringly.Įlsewhere in Trippton, the school board is discussing a motion to kill Clancy Conley, a reporter who has stumbled onto irrefutable evidence that they’ve been embezzling a million dollars a year from the budget.

Since dogs are members of the family in this hunting community, it’s Virgil’s job to calm down folks like Winky Butterfield (who openly weeps over the black Labs he has lost) and the other good old boys who have organized and armed themselves into a lynch mob. It seems that a syndicate of miscreants has been stealing dogs and auctioning them off to “bunchers” for resale as laboratory animals. In DEADLINE (Putnam, $27.95), Virgil’s fishing buddy Johnson Johnson (like his brother, Mercury, he was named by his outboard-motor-enthusiast father, Big Johnson) alerts him to a crime wave in the Mississippi River town of Trippton. A tall, lean guy who lives in cowboy boots and T-shirts from vintage-band concerts, Virgil wears his blond hair “country-long like Waylon Jennings.” He leaves the big-time crime-busting to his boss in Minneapolis, Lucas Davenport (“not a bad guy, though a trifle intense”), so he can grab the fun assignments for himself.

And then there’s Virgil Flowers, the happy-go-lucky hero of John Sandford’s roughneck crime novels set in rural Minnesota. There are plenty of fictional cops and private eyes with anger issues, woman troubles and drinking problems.

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