Our hero, Virgil Flowers, a state cop who works for the infamous Lucas Davenport, is a character you have to love, a guy who would rather fish than fight crime but knows he has to do both, a reluctant hero whose growing fame bothers him and who figures he "will have to fuck something up to get back to normal." The guy thinks about God every night before bed, but doesn't exactly pray: "Whoever God was, Virgil seriously doubted that he cared too much about profanity, sex or even death. He left the world alone, people alone, each to work out a separate destiny."

And, oh, Flowers is a preacher's son, so he knows from the Bible - when a born-again redneck makes some comment about gay people and God's judgment, he snaps back: "The soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul."

("Was David queer?" another cop asks him later. "Who knows," Flowers says. "Donatello apparently thought so.")

Flowers is trying to solve a high-profile murder while desperately trying to get laid with the one straight woman around, and coming oh-so-close, over and over. It's almost-sex, almost-sex, embarrassing-erection almost sex. The poor guy's dick is practically a suspense novel in itself.

But there's a good main storyline, too. A woman who runs an ad agency is murdered while she's taking a nocturnal canoe trip out on the lake behind the high-end women-only resort. That leads Flowers to a band that plays at a local club, whose lead singer may have been fucking the ad lady - and all of a sudden, everyone who has anything to do with the band (which might be on the cusp of commercial success) starts showing up dead.

Flowers stumbles along through the case - and we're reminded how easily the cops can screw things up, and how a classic police clusterfuck can lead to a bad shooting. In the end, the band is the center of the whole rotten plot, which is fine with Sandford, a fan of obscure rock, who throws in references to Appleseed and Blood Red Shoes.

Sandford's politics are subtle, but he's a very different thinker than many of today's crime-thriller writers. "I worry about cops with machine guns," one character notes toward the end of the book. "We're turning ourselves into the military. Got machine guns, got squad cars that are like tanks...It's going to come to a bad end. Hell, you get an ordinary car chase and half the time somebody winds up dead. And half the time, it's somebody who's completely innocent, trying to cross the street."

Minnesota prairie wisdom. Don't miss it.