The action amps up as the bodies start to fall. The robbers who would be the beneficiaries of inside help in their theft quickly delve into a treacherous double cross when a key piece of evidence turns up.

Virgil has to weed his way through the medical quacks who would look to trade in exotic medicine while keeping an eye on a crazed animal rights assassin looking to take down one of those quacks. The media scrutiny shines a suffocating light on Flowers and the BCA. Flowers is tasked with the unenviable task of locating the exotic felines before they meet an untimely end. His latest assignment finds the brilliant detective on the trail of a couple of kidnapped tigers. Jeff Strickler is a writer and editor at the Star Tribune.Virgil Flowers clearly has his hands full. This one is a little undercooked, but there's certain to be another one coming down the line soon. There is one saving grace for Sandford fans: He churns out these serial novels with the proclivity of a mini-donut machine. It's certainly a topic worth exploring, but we're not exactly talking Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle' here. Flowers' girlfriend gets recruited to help with research for a doctoral thesis on how a food processing plant is taking advantage of its low-paid immigrant workforce. We end up knowing a little about all of them but not much about anyone in particular.Īdding to the sense of distance is a subplot that doesn't add much except 50 pages. But by the time we've met everyone, it's hard to figure out who to focus on - a problem the author seems to wrestle with a bit, too. To his credit, Sanford tries to make all of them interesting.

It takes planners, henchmen, brokers, exporters and importers. It opens with crooks stealing two rare tigers from a zoo with the intention of selling their organs on the black market for traditional Asian medicine. It's a typical Sandford work in that the plot starts quickly and moves briskly. He almost makes up for this with a terrific third act, but by then he's fighting an uphill battle. In 'Escape Clause,' the newest crime thriller featuring detective Virgil Flowers, we're well past the midway point before Sandford puts some oomph into his malefactor. It's the bad guys, different in each installment, who offer the potential for creating intriguing new characters. Once a protagonist has been established, there's only so much more that can be added in successive books. One of the keys to John Sandford's success as a serial author is his ability to take us inside the twisted psyches of his villains.

Escape clause john sandford review