The 3rd book in the Virgil Flowers series ➙ Rough Country.

The earlier books in this excellent series are not nearly as good as later ones.

To me Virgil seems very two dimensional in this one. I didn’t much care about his investigation.

Virgil’s always been known for having a somewhat active, er, social life, but he’s probably not going to be getting too many opportunities for that during his new case.

While competing in a fishing tournament in a remote area of northern Minnesota, he gets a call from Lucas Davenport to investigate a murder at a nearby resort, where a woman has been shot while kayaking. The resort is for women only, a place to relax, get fit, recover from plastic surgery, commune with nature, and while it didn’t start out to be a place mostly for those with Sapphic inclinations, that’s pretty much what it is today.

Which makes things all the more complicated for Virgil, because as he begins investigating, he finds a web of connections between the people at the resort, the victim, and some local women, notably a talented country singer, and the more he digs, the move he discovers the arrows of suspicion that point in many directions, encompassing a multitude of motivations: jealousy, blackmail, greed, anger, fear.

And then he discovers that this is not the first murder, that there was a second, seemingly unrelated one, the year before.

And that there’s about to be a third, definitely related one, any time now.

And as for the fourth… well, Virgil better hope he can catch the killer before that happens.

Because it could be his own.