Minnesota mystery author John Sandford (John Camp) has not given up his hugely popular series of “Prey” novels featuring millionaire cop Lucas Davenport, but Davenport’s getting a little domestic and long in the tooth these days. In order to continue writing books with sex appeal, Sandford has launched a new series featuring Davenport’s associate Virgil Flowers. While Davenport fulfills male fantasies by having powerful, expensive cars that he drives very fast, Flowers’ fantasy appeal is more organic. Aside from his remarkable clearance rate as a detective, Flowers is apparently walking candy to women (although the author derives a lot of comedy out of frustrating his desires in this particular story).

Readers tired of sex in novels are advised to stay away from Rough Country, the latest Virgil Flowers. Its very setting—a women-only fishing resort in northern Minnesota, frequented by a number of lesbians—guarantees a large degree of sexual tension, and a certain amount of discomfort when a male detective—even a fashionably broad-minded one like Flowers—starts investigating its affairs.

Erica McDill, a successful Twin Cities advertising executive, is enjoying nature in a canoe on a lake near the resort when she is shot through the head with a small-caliber bullet. Virgil Flowers, in the general area to participate in a long-anticipated fishing tournament, gets dragooned into the investigation. As he questions the people in McDill’s life, he meets an attractive accountant who isn’t interested in men, but who has a sister who is. Also there’s McDill’s old lover, who fears (rightly) she’s about to be dumped, and her new lover, a local country singer whom McDill wanted to help to get a break in the business. The constellation of relationships around these people offers multiple motives and multiple suspects, and Sandford does a good job dragging one red herring after another across the reader’s track.

The subject of homosexuality looms large in this book. Like most straight males, I am far less repulsed (on a visceral level) by lesbianism than by male homosexuality, but I had my uncomfortable moments, particularly when a born-again Christian who voices an objection to homosexuality is rebutted by Flowers with a reference (which the author seems to think a telling one) to David and Jonathan. However, Sandford got my friendship back a little later when he examined Flowers’ (who is, we are told the son of a minister, and who “thinks about God” every night before going to sleep) conscience.

Virgil further worried that he was a guy who simply wanted to eat his cake, and have it too—his philosophy, as a born-again once pointed out to him, pretty much allowed him to carry on as he wished, like your average godless commie.

Rough Country is not for those who look for uplift in their fiction. But if, like me, you enjoy a lot of action, a dash of sexual tension, and interesting characters in your mysteries, I recommend it. Cautions for language and adult themes.

On the Virtual Book Tour front, today’s stop is here. (This blog, for some reason, publishes in white text on a white background, so you’ll have to highlight the text to read it.)

You may have to find the links yourself, at the banner up above, for the next few days, as I’m going out of town, to the International Vinland Seminar in Chicago. My renter, who once stared down Chuck Norris, will be watching the house, with his biker friends.