I got back into a reading mode over the past few days revisiting a couple of favorite authors and one new one.

John Sandford, a long time favorite and the author of the Prey series featuring Lucas Davenport also has another series of books featuring Virgil Flowers. Flowers is an agent for the Minnesota Bureau Of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) and works for Davenport. While Flowers, who is thrice married and thrice divorced, is a cop he doesn’t like carrying a gun and often doesn’t. Besides his job at the BCA he is an outdoor writer and often tows his boat around as he moves about outstate Minnesota preforming his law enforcement duties just in case there is an opportunity to go fishing. In the latest adventure, Storm Front, Flowers is chasing down an antiquity supposedly stolen from an archeological dig in the Middle East by a highly respected professor who is suffering from terminal cancer. For seasoning throw in the; Mossad, FBI, CIA, Israeli Antiquity folks and a highly feared international mob boss. Add to that a few colorful local folks including an attractive young woman that operates on the fringes of the law, and sometimes across the fringes, and the result is a throughly enjoyable read. I challenge you to read the book and tell me you saw the ending coming. Highly recommended. In an earlier post I reviewed an earlier books in the Flowers series which also are great reads. As an aside if you haven’t tried them you might want to sample the books in the Prey series. If you do it helps, but is not necessary, to read them in the order they were published.

In earlier posts I’ve discussed books by Kathy Reichs. Reichs, in real life is a Forensic Anthropologist, after whom the Temperance Brennan in the books and the Bones television series are based. Also in earlier posts I have wondered why the Temperance Brennan in the television series was not modeled after the character in the books as Brennan in the books is, in my humble or unhumble opinion as the case may be, a much more interesting character than the one in the TV series. But what do I know? In her latest offering, Bones Of The Lost, Brennan gets involved attempting to identify a young girl who was the victim of a hit-and-un. The supposition is that the victim is an illegal and probably a prostitute. In the midst of investigation Brennan is convinced by her almost ex-husband to do an exhumation and forensic autopsy in Afghanistan. The reason for the trip is to assist the son of a retired general who has been accused of, and is facing a court martial for, shooting two unarmed locals. She agrees to the trip, gets shelled, gets together with her daughter who is in the Army stationed in Afghanistan and returns to Charlotte and the aforementioned hit-and-run. As is usually the case the plot thickens and morphs into human trafficking and murder. I have enjoyed all of the books in this series and this one did not disappoint. As an aside, reading this and other books in the series will probably ruin watching the Bones TV series for you – it did for me.

In a much earlier post I featured Tony Hillerman. Hillerman passed away in 2008 but left an amazing legacy of novels about two Navajo policemen, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. The Leaphorn/Chee books, and there are 18 of them, are sited in the Four Corners area in Northern Arizona. If you have not tried Hillerman you owe it to yourself to give one a try but thats not what this is about, I typically have substantial reservations when someone picks up the characters and story-lines of a departed author. So with more than a little trepidation I ordered Spider Woman’s Daughter by Anne Hillerman, Tony Hillerman’s daughter. In the opening Joe Leaphorn is grievously shot and the incident is witnessed by Bernadette Manuelito, a Navajo police officer and Jim Chee’s wife. By the way Manuelito also was a character in the earlier Hillerman works. As the story unfolds the shooting of a police officer, even one that is retired, causes quite a stir and kicks off an investigation that prowls through Leaphorn’s old cases searching for someone with a motive. To give you a sense of Leaphorn’s character and standing he was referred to as the “Legendary Lieutenant”. Along the way we are introduced to a substantial transfer of valuable collection of Navajo and other tribes historical artifacts that Leaphorn was researching and a few missing pages from his assessment. Anne Hillerman is a journalist and author and she did a remarkable job of replicating not only the characters but the tone and tenor of her father’s writing. If, like me, you enjoyed Tony Hillerman’s work you will find Anne’s equally enjoyable. Highly recommended.

That’s it for now. I have a new Stuart Woods book in the wings but more about that later.