Scan barcode
A review by yevolem
Bloody Genius by John Sandford
3.0
This was structurally similar to the previous Flowers entry, but somewhat better. It's on a suitable path now, but I still feel the stakes are too low and his skills aren't being properly utilized. The high profile cases with considerable stakes are being covered by the Davenport series, so I guess this was done to keep them differentiated. As is the trend now for the series, this is decidedly a mystery rather than a thriller. It did better at it than the previous book, but I think Sandford's talents lie much more in the thriller than the mystery genre.
The Goodreads description of the book is misleading and I don't know what their goal for doing so was. It made it seem like this was about culture war stuff and an interdepartmental struggle. Either that or it wasn't meant to be obvious, to me at least, what the intention was for the murder in the opening pages. Maybe that's the case, because the narrative treats it as some grand mystery with false theories and red herrings aplenty. If anything, it's a warning against tunnel vision and otherwise preconceived ideals. Occam's razor is certainly applicable as well.
I have to wonder whether the resolution was intentionally meant to be meta humor, because I could see it being as an absurdist joke. It's not a shaggy dog story, but it does contain elements of that. There are several clues to the identity of the murderer, but they're more obvious in retrospect.
I liked the self-referential humor, which is nice because I didn't care much for the attempts at humor in the previous books. The characters were weird, not in a bad way, but seemingly different from what came before. I would've expected them more in a game like Danganronpa or Ace Attorney rather than in this series with their intense singularly defining personality trait. Maybe I'm just noticing it more, but it seemed like there were a lot more brand names than usual.
As a note, this may be the last separate Virgil Flowers book based on what Sandford said in a interview. For more details on that, see what I wrote about The Investigator.
Rating: 3.5/5
The Goodreads description of the book is misleading and I don't know what their goal for doing so was. It made it seem like this was about culture war stuff and an interdepartmental struggle. Either that or it wasn't meant to be obvious, to me at least, what the intention was for the murder in the opening pages. Maybe that's the case, because the narrative treats it as some grand mystery with false theories and red herrings aplenty. If anything, it's a warning against tunnel vision and otherwise preconceived ideals. Occam's razor is certainly applicable as well.
I have to wonder whether the resolution was intentionally meant to be meta humor, because I could see it being as an absurdist joke. It's not a shaggy dog story, but it does contain elements of that. There are several clues to the identity of the murderer, but they're more obvious in retrospect.
I liked the self-referential humor, which is nice because I didn't care much for the attempts at humor in the previous books. The characters were weird, not in a bad way, but seemingly different from what came before. I would've expected them more in a game like Danganronpa or Ace Attorney rather than in this series with their intense singularly defining personality trait. Maybe I'm just noticing it more, but it seemed like there were a lot more brand names than usual.
As a note, this may be the last separate Virgil Flowers book based on what Sandford said in a interview. For more details on that, see what I wrote about The Investigator.
Rating: 3.5/5