![\"freeze\"](\"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/freeze.jpg\")
<\/a>If you don\u2019t think murder and assorted lesser crimes can be funny, you haven\u2019t read any of John Sandford\u2019s Virgil Flowers detective novels.<\/p>\nA detective with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Virgil gets sent into all manner of interesting backwoods and small-town locales to solve the crimes that might baffle the local cops. In the process, he encounters a lot of colorful characters. Sometimes he makes some of them angry. He doesn\u2019t like to carry his gun, so angry people can be a problem.<\/p>\n
This time out, Virgil is sent to Trippton, a small town along the Mississippi River where the body of the richest woman in town has been discovered frozen in a block of ice. Virgil\u2019s been to Trippton before, when he busted the corrupt and homicidal local school board, most of whose members are still in prison.<\/p>\n
Since Trippton is a small town, everybody already knows Virgil and has opinions about him. Sometimes that\u2019s good; sometimes it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n
We know from the beginning who killed the woman. It happened right after the committee planning the 25th<\/sup> reunion for their class at the local high school met at her house. \u201cBug Boy,\u201d who inherited the local pest-control business from his father and got the local Dunkin\u2019 Donuts franchise in his divorce, has always had a secret passion for the woman, even though both of them had been married, for a while but not any longer, to other people. After their classmates leave the meeting, he, emboldened by her treating him more or less cordially, goes back into her house with a bottle of champagne and high hopes. When she slaps him and rakes his scalp with her fingernails, he instinctively moves to hit back, forgetting the heavy bottle of champagne in his hand. When he discovers that he killed her, he\u2019s devastated, but he\u2019s also determined to protect himself, since, he reasons, he didn\u2019t mean to, so he\u2019s not really guilty.<\/p>\n He leaves her on the living room floor, rearranging things a little in hopes that whoever finds her will think she fell down the stairs. Then he hurries off to establish his alibi by signing karaoke at a local bar.<\/p>\n When her body is found in the block of ice in a part of the river that\u2019s thawed because of a sewage plant outflow, Bug Boy is as shocked as everybody else.<\/p>\n It takes Virgil a while to figure out that he\u2019s looking for two people, the murderer and the person who dumped the woman, her purse and shoes into the river for whatever reason.<\/p>\n Meantime, his bosses pressure him into helping a private detective from California who has been sent to Trippton to stop a ring that\u2019s got a hot business selling Barbie dolls that have been modified to be very vocally sexy. His efforts on that score raise a lot of ire because times are tough and a number of locals are making money off the Barbie-Os. When Virgil snoops around too much, he gets beaten up by a gang of irate women outside another local bar.<\/p>\n His investigations into both the murder, involving as it does a high school reunion, and the Barbie-O ring, lead him to discover a lot of the adultery and even B&D (bondage and discipline) that, along with ice fishing and snowmobiling, help the locals make it through the long, cold winters.<\/p>\n He also gathers more evidence that a lot of criminals are really pretty stupid, sometimes in an amusing sort of way.<\/p>\n This is a good crime novel well blended with a good satire on life in small-town Minnesota. Eric Conger, who has recorded a lot of Sandford\u2019s books, does a great job of reading, appropriately deadpan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson DEEP FREEZE. By John Sandford. Penguin Audio. Read by Eric Conger. 10 hours; 8 CDs. $40. If you don\u2019t think murder and assorted lesser crimes can be funny, you haven\u2019t read any of John Sandford\u2019s Virgil Flowers detective novels. A detective with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Virgil gets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[590,1008,426],"tags":[560,562],"class_list":["post-2240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-detective-fiction-mysteries","category-police-procedural","category-popular-fiction","tag-john-sandford","tag-virgil-flowers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2240"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2242,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240\/revisions\/2242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}