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Book summary and reviews of Mad River by John Sandford

Mad River by John Sandford

Mad River

A Virgil Flowers Novel

by John Sandford

  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Published:
  • Oct 2012
    400 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Bonnie and Clyde, they thought. And what's-his-name, the sidekick. Three teenagers with dead-end lives, and chips on their shoulders, and guns.

The first person they killed was a highway patrolman. The second was a woman during a robbery. Then, hell, why not keep on going? As their crime spree cuts a swath through rural Minnesota, some of it captured on the killers' cell phones and sent to a local television station, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers joins the growing army of cops trying to run them down. But even he doesn't realize what's about to happen next.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"In this high-octane thrill ride, bestseller Sandford's fifth novel featuring Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agent Virgil Flowers (after 2011's Shock Wave), Lucas Davenport, Virgil's boss (and star of his own series), dispatches Virgil to a remote corner of the state to deal with 'a bad one'...Virgil's penchant for wisecracking, which in less skilled hands could have been annoying, serves to deflate the tension, and his backstory is simple enough to allow new readers to easily keep up." - Publishers Weekly

"Sandford explores the unstable dynamics among the three fugitives and raises questions about how any of the easily identified culprits can ever be brought to justice...None of these minor complications, though, are enough to raise Virgil's sixth (Shock Wave, 2011, etc.) much above the level of a highly competent but routine manhunt." - Kirkus

"The latest superb Virgil Flowers police procedural (see Shock Wave and Bad Blood) is a great manhunt thriller. The fast-paced storyline is filled with shocking twists of a Mad River, but especially a late one as the audience nears the delta in which John Sandford proves he is one of the sub-genre best when the author laid out clues but hid them brilliantly." - Genre Go Round Reviews

This information about Mad River was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

John Sandford Author Biography

John Sandford is the pseudonym of John Roswell Camp, an American author and journalist. Camp won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 1986, and was one of four finalists for the prize in 1980. He also was the winner of the Distinguished Writing Award of the American Society of Newspaper Editors for 1985.

Camp is the author of more than forty published novels, all of which have appeared, in one format or another, on the New York Times best-seller lists. He is also the co-author of three young-adult books in the Singular Menace series, with Michele Cook, and co-author of the science-fiction thriller Saturn Run with Ctein.

He is the author of two non-fiction books, one on art The Eye and the Heart: The Watercolors of John Stuart Ingle and one on plastic surgery, Plastic Surgery: the ...

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Link to John Sandford's Website

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