Bad Blood

August 9, 2010
When 19-year-old Bob Tripp hits farmer Jacob Flood in the head with a T-ball bat at the outset of Sandford's exciting fourth thriller to feature Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agent Virgil Flowers (after Rough Country), Tripp's subsequent attempt to make murder look like an accident fails. The morning after Tripp's arrest, he's found hanging in his cell. Warren County sheriff Lee Coakley seeks Flowers's help to investigate what role, if any, deputy Jim Crocker, the officer on duty at the jail at the time, played in Tripp's death. A link to the earlier murder of a young woman leads Flowers and Coakley to members of a small church with strange ways. As the pair become aware of the magnitude of the unspeakable crimes (rape, child abuse, incest) behind the deaths, they search desperately for a lever to pry open what turns out to be Flowers's biggest, if perhaps most unlikely, case to date. Author tour.

John Sandford has written many chilling mysteries, and BAD BLOOD is among his scariest. What starts out as a cut-and-dried murder investigation with detective Virgil Flowers soon devolves into a complicated case involving a religious cult that has incorporated child sex into its Sunday service. Narrator Eric Conger is no stranger to crime novels, and he does his usual splendid job keeping the complex story line manageable with clear character definition. His laid-back style is perfectly suited to bringing out the contrast between the clean-cut Flowers and the rough-edged characters in the story. Conger makes Flowers's passion clear--the detective needs to solve the case and save the children. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine