Dark of the Moon by John Sandford

This was my first time "reading" Sanford (I did this as an audio book) and I thoroughly enjoyed this selection. Of course, when any story is set in a known local the reader tends to derive a bit more enjoyment from the story. This was no different and I had fun tracking the character's movements around Southern Minnesota and the Twin Cities.

However, the gentlemen reading the story on the audio tape wasn't from Minnesota (or Iowa or South Dakota) and inadvertently mangled a couple of city pronunciations. Gave me a chuckle at any rate, but nothing to detract from the quality of the book.

The premise of the book, from Goodreads:  Virgil Flowers-tall, lean, late thirties, three times divorced, hair way too long for a cop's-had kicked around for a while before joining the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. First, it was the army and the military police, then the police in St. Paul, and finally Lucas Davenport had brought him into the BCA, promising him, "We'll only give you the hard stuff." He'd been doing the hard stuff for three years now-but never anything like this. In the small town of Bluestem, where everybody knows everybody, a house way up on a ridge explodes into flames, its owner, a man named Judd, trapped inside. There is a lot of reason to hate him, Flowers discovers. Years ago, Judd had perpetrated a scam that'd driven a lot of local farmers out of business, even to suicide. There are also rumors swirling around: of some very dicey activities with other men's wives; of involvement with some nutcase religious guy; of an out-of-wedlock daughter. In fact, Flowers concludes, you'd probably have to dig around to find a person who didn't despise him. And that wasn't even the reason Flowers had come to Bluestem. Three weeks before, there'd been another murder-two, in fact-a doctor and his wife, the doctor found propped up in his backyard, both eyes shot out. There hadn't been a murder in Bluestem in years-and now, suddenly, three? Flowers knows two things: This wasn't a coincidence, and this had to be personal. But just how personal is something even he doesn't realize, and may not find out until too late. Because the next victim ... may be himself.

As for the story itself, I thought it was fairly well written, with enough leads and trails to keep me guessing till fairly late in the story who the antagonist was. Granted, you are introduced to the slimeball in the first chapter, but to pull him out from the other characters as seen from their point of view was not so easy.  I appreciated that. 

The protagonist, Virgil Flowers, is your typical flawed detective, but in a rough appealing sort of way that for once didn't involve being a closet drunk or fanatically depressed - which is what I usually read (Martin Cruz Smith, George Alex Effinger, Henning Mankell).

So setting, character development, and plot made this a worthwhile book. Just don't listen to it while driving though a major metropolitan area or you may just miss your exit...