"Shock Wave"

John Sandford's "Shock Wave" is the 5th book, I believe, in the Virgil Flowers series and it's another fast read despite its 388 pages.  The stage is set when PyeMart decides it wants to move into the small Minnesota river town of Butternut Falls but there are a lot of factions opposed to the idea who are ready to do what they can to stop the construction.

Step one occurs when someone places a bomb in the corporate boardroom of Pye Pinnacle in Michigan.  Instead of killing Willard Pye, though, it goes off before a board meeting starts and kills his executive assistant and seriously injures a food service worker.

Three weeks later a bomb goes off at the PyeMart construction site just outside Butternut Falls and kills a construction superintendent and injures the civil engineer with him.  So, of course, Lucas Davenport calls Virgil Flowers and sends him to Butternut Falls to find the bomber before more people are killed.

Unfortunately, he's not able to stop some additional bombings and deaths but he and his persistent crew are on the trail of suspects and narrowing the field.  In the meantime, they and Flowers are at risk, too.

And....just to make things interesting, it appears the local council were bribed to change the zoning laws to allow PyeMart to build in a location that wasn't meant to be built on.  Davenport would find it a plus if Flowers could manage to take down those who were bribed while finding the bomber.

On a personal note, Virgil's current love, Lee Coakley, is in L.A. working as a consultant on a made-for-TV movie based on one of her cases.  Virgil feels things beginning to cool between them when they talk by phone but isn't quite ready to let go yet even though he's feeling some attraction towards Pye's assistant.

Flowers is juggling a lot right now -- is he up to it?   If previous Flowers' novels are any indication, he is!  I found this another great Sandford read.  pazt