thrillers – Cozy with Books

Book Description

Title: Deep Freeze
Series: Virgil Flowers Book # 10
Author: John Sandford
Edition: Kindle (Libby/Library) & Hardcover
Length: 390 (Kindle) & 391 (Hardcover)
Genre/s: Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Mystery Thriller, Suspense, Crime, Police Procedural

Blurb (Goodreads)

Class reunions: a time for memories—good, bad, and, as Virgil Flowers is about to find out, sometimes deadly—in this “New York Times” bestselling thriller from John Sandford.

Virgil knows the town of Trippton, Minnesota a little too well. A few years back, he investigated the corrupt—and as it turned out, homicidal—local school board, and now the town’s back in his view with more alarming news: a woman has been found dead, frozen in a block of ice.

There’s a possibility that it might be connected to a high school class of twenty-five years ago. It has a mid-winter reunion coming up. So, wrapping his coat a little tighter, Virgil begins to dig into decades of traumas, feuds, and bad blood. In the process, one thing becomes increasingly clear to him. It’s true what they say – high school can be murder.

Review

On the day that I’d finished reading this book (06 Feb) I had been at the 70% mark when I’d gone off to do a little writing in my journal first before continuing with the read, stating that with where it was standing, the book’s already at a solid 4.0 but considering that most of my favorite moments in [nearly all of] the Virgil Flowers series comes from the shockingly well written climaxes and final chapters of the book, I wouldn’t be surprised if Deep Freeze ended up the same. It did.

This was a good book, but it started off a bit slow, and damn it, I’ve never seen poor Virgil run himself in circles as much as he did than in this book. In most of his other books (and plenty of mystery books in general) you get glimpses of the answer, which finally breaks through in the very last few chapters. There’s plenty of other times Virgil get stuck trying to crack a case, but in Deep Freeze, he was frozen (pun intended?).

In book ten of the series, Virgil is back in Trippton, Minnesota, where he had previously found himself investigating a meth mill case, dog-napping incident, and faced with a corrupt and murderous school board (yes, all three cases in one town; sounds like a lovely vacation spot, yes?). It’s also where his best friend and fishing buddy, Johnson Johnson lives.

Unlike last time, where he had visited Trippton as a favor to Johnson Johnson, this time, Virgil is called in to investigate the murder of a very wealthy, and soon to be divorced, woman named Gina Hemming. Besides this, his boss, Jon Duncan, is asking him to investigate and aid a private investigator, Margaret Griffin, in tracking down the creators of some sexually modified Barbie and Ken dolls so that she could serve them their cease-and-desist letters and GTFO out of the brilliantly cold Minnesota and head on back to her warm home in California.

The thing about this book, as in many of Sandford’s other books, is that the name of the killer is already handed to you in the first chapter. Hell, it’s the second word into the book. Instead of guessing who the killer is, you get to guess how long it takes for Virgil to find said bad guy and it takes him a WHILE. In a town full of very gossipy, tight-knit, but generally friendly citizens and people, nobody could believe such a crime could exist in their lovely town (except ya know, the crazy school board a while back in the same general neighborhood as the dog-nappers and the meth factory?). With absolutely jack squat to go on, Virgil’s at a loss and no amount of turning up stones would be helping him. What he does end up unearthing is that the crime is related to a high school class from twenty-five years ago, and winds up digging up plenty of very unpleasant things.

But then, you have the other case and it seems the town DOES know about the person and team behind the manufacturing of the Barbies and Kens. There’s a funny running joke in the beginning where just about everyone and their mother lies about knowing the suspected person when Virgil could tell that they’re all lying through their teeth. Still, his priority is the murder and not the dolls, at least until a group of people turn the case personal against Virgil.

Some of my favorite things about the Virgil Flowers series are the people and dialogues, and in Deep Freeze the characters are not short of personality. While we have plenty of recurring characters (Johnson Johnson, Sheriff Purdy, Jenkins and Shrake, not to mention some of the Tripptonites) we also have a new character and this time, she’s from out of state (sunny state of California and oh so ill prepared for the Minnesota blizzard…I mean she arrived in thin-soled flats!). An ex-LA cop turned PI, it’s interesting to see how she investigates things and views people versus Virgil. I liked her at first, intense and cool, but when she showed a bit more of unnecessary violence, I started to dislike her. I didn’t hate this character, but I certainly didn’t enjoy her as much towards the end.

When he got back, the woman had flopped over onto her stomach, bleeding heavily into the snow. Virgil grabbed one wrist, and she tried to push up with her other hand, but Griffin stepped over, put her heel on the woman’s cheekbone, and pushed down. The woman squealed, and Virgil said, “Don’t hurt her,” and Griffin asked, “Why not?”

Virgil said, “She’s hurt bad enough already.” Virgil got the woman’s other wrist and locked it up, and said to Griffin, “Help me get her into the backseat of my truck.”

The rest of the book was a fun ride and while not always full of adrenaline and downright insane events, especially compared to Deadline (the previous book set in Trippton), this book has its perks. For example, I’ve never seen Virgil so lost on what to do before. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, nor were the slow parts, because it feels like everything builds up to a fantastic “Holy shit, I got it!” moment (and indeed it did).

While Deep Freeze stands well enough on its own, unlike the other books, I wouldn’t say it would be the best standalone you could read (if you choose to do so or start the series in this book). Because this book sets in the same town as a previous book had, with the entire town is still ringing in shock from the previous events and long story short, there’s not just nudges towards previous cases, but perhaps even major spoilers for Deadline. Time and time again, people in town will mention the events from Deadline so if you don’t like spoilers much, I’d avoid starting this book until you at least read that book.

“I like your murders. They give you something to think about. In L.A., it was BANG! BANG! BANG!, two dead, one of them a gang member, the other a five-year-old girl on her way to buy a Popsicle. Simple, in-your-face nutcake homicide. Here, you’ve got to ‘detect.’”

“I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about God,” Virgil said. “I’m a Lutheran minister’s kid, and, believe me, there’s a difference between a religion and God. I sorta cut out the middleman.”

When Virgil was working as a St. Paul homicide cop, he’d known of two separate killings done for single eight balls of cocaine. An eight ball, at the time, was worth maybe a hundred and fifty dollars. Kill somebody for a million? No problem. No fuckin’ problem at all.