"Deadline"

I have to admit I was intrigued when the Post-Gazette’s book review editor handed me a copy of “Deadline” by John Sandford and said it was perfect for me.

Turns out the novel is about a school board that calls a closed-door session to take a vote to put out a hit on the local newspaper reporter who discovered that school officials had been siphoning $1 million a year from the district’s $39 million budget.

I am a reporter who covers school boards and have on more than a few occasions reported on financial and other dealings that board members likely would have preferred to keep secret.

And I’ve often sat outside closed-door sessions, also called executive sessions, trying to figure out what the board is discussing behind those doors. Was the book editor trying to tell me something?

The reporter in “Deadline,” Clancey Conley, a 45-year-old former drug addict whose career has bottomed out at the Trippton Republican-River weekly newspaper in rural Minnesota, ends up dead by the end of the third chapter.

The rest of the story folds his murder investigation, the breakup of a dognapping ring and a meth-lab bust into a fast-moving read with lots of details, action and complicated, colorful characters.

“Deadline” marks the eighth book in a series featuring Virgil Flowers, an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. John Sandford is a pseudonym of John Roswell Camp, an author and journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 1986 for a series of stories titled “Life on the Land: An American Farm Family.” He is the author of 35 published novels and two nonfiction books.

Virgil Flowers was developed from a previous series of detective novels built around the character Lucas Davenport, who is Flowers’ boss in “Deadline.” The book starts with Flowers being called to Trippton by his friend to investigate a dog stealing ring when he gets drawn into the Clancey Conley murder case.

Readers are quickly drawn to the main characters in each of the story’s threads — the school board members and their conspirators, the meth-cooking hillbillies who live on an isolated hillside and the dog snatchers who are suspected of keeping the dogs on that same hillside until they sell them for medical research.

By the end of the novel there will be multiple dead bodies as the Buchanan County Consolidated school board continues to knock off anyone who threatens its secret, even a local meth lab operator, to throw police off their trail.

Like many real-life reporters, Conley gets his first tip to the big scandal story from low-level school employees, including a bus driver and cafeteria worker who suggest that the costs for gas and food are recorded higher in the district’s budget than the actual payout.

The reporter is on the verge of breaking the story when he makes the mistake of confiding in his editor, Viking Laughton, owner of the paper, regular reporter for the school board and co-conspirator in the embezzling scheme.

Soon Conley’s body is found in a roadside ditch, and Flowers is pulled from his dog-stealing case to solve the murder.

Flowers doesn’t get a lot of help from local authorities, but a senior citizen who likes to keep an eye on the school district budget, a 12-year-old who lives and lurks near the meth-making hillbillies, and the school custodian help him to nail down evidence.

While not every event in the story line is plausible, the rich characters, the descriptions of small-town life, politics and corruption and the concurrent trails of action make for a fast and entertaining read.