Local Authors
No Author’s Corner can start without a nod to my friend John Camp, who readers know as John Sanford. His most recent novel, “Righteous Prey’’ – there are 32 Prey novels – features Lucas Davenport and his pal, Virgil Flowers. The dialogue between these two is sharp, worth the price of the book.
Davenport and Flowers are trying to bring to ground a demented gang of bitcoin billionaires who are killing people because the gang thinks they deserve to be killed. Yes, it’s set in Minnesota but we travel the country in the unfolding.
Great stuff. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“Bloody Genius’’ is a stand-alone Flowers novel, because, as readers can tell, Sanford likes Virgil. Virgil is chill. Virgil enters the world of the Failed Academy and has to try and find a murderer among all the Failed Academy whack jobs.
Delightful. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
In “The Investigator,’’ Sanford spins off Davenport’s daughter, Letty. Why not? Like father, like daughter. Letty is tasked by a U.S. senator to work for Homeland Security in the pursuit of stolen crude oil in Texas. Guns, militias, Texas sunsets, pickup trucks and mayhem.
Hell yeah. ⭐⭐⭐⭐
You like a nice twist that you didn’t see coming? I never read Minnesota author Brian Freeman prior to just recently reading his newest thriller, “The Zero Night.’’ Duluth police detective Jonathon Stride, who is the star of many Freeman novels, works the streets of Duluth to crack a kidnapping case involving a Duluth attorney. Don’t want to say too much. The twist is impressive. Freeman captures a nice sense of the north shore. I will be reading more from Freeman.
Page turner. ⭐⭐⭐⭐
There was a time when William Kent Krueger was getting as much publicity for writing his Cork O’Connor novels in a booth at the St. Clair Broiler as he was getting for the novels themselves. That’s changed and after taking a break from reading Krueger I returned to read his latest, “Fox Creek.’’
Krueger’s characters are more polished, the Ojibwe healer, Henry Meloux, now at least 100 years old, chief among them. The town is Aurora, near the Boundary Waters.
We have a three-part chase. Henry leads two women, one of them O’Connor’s wife, in a dangerous escape through the woods. They are pursued by mercenaries who want the woman Henry is protecting. On the trail of the mercenaries is O’Connor and a young native who can read the ground almost as well as Henry.
I’m going to be getting back to Krueger and checking up on what I missed.