I’ve been a fan of JohnSandford’s  books for many years, and have generally enjoyed the Lucas Davenport books more than the Virgil Flowers ones…in fact, the last two Flowers books I have read, Holy Ghost and Bloody Genius, have been serious disappointments for me. So I was happy to see that the focus for Sandford’s latest offering, The Investigator, was on someone other than Virgil (who I used to LOVE). But it’s NOT Lucas, this time it is his daughter, Letty.

Lucas and his wife adopted Letty after Lucas “found” her working on a case. Previous books have followed her growing into an interesting woman, who is no longer a child. She is a twenty-four-year-old graduate of Stanford with a Masters in Economics, and she has a job that is boring her to tears working for a U.S. Senator. Just when she is ready to quit, the Senator offers her the opportunity to work with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), investigating some thefts of crude oil in Texas. It isn’t the loss of the oil that concerns the Senator – he wants to know what the money that results from the sale of the crude is being used for. It looks like a militia group in Texas might be planning something along the lines of domestic terrorism.

Letty heads for Texas where she is partnered with John Kaiser, a DHS Investigator who is not at all interested in working with her – until he sees how she handles a gun. They work together to find the mysterious militia leader Jane Jael Hawkes, whose father “…had been a white-trash loafer, hard drinker, and sometime over-the-road truck driver…” Jane joined the Army, which she though was a “...way out of that life, if you couldn’t afford community college. She was wrong about that; some things that you were born with you can never escape.” Hawkes began attracting followers to her cause, which she called ResistUS.Although “…most militias were composed of hapkess goofs with guns and confused ideas about America and patriotism,” Jane’s group was different, although they had much in common with the other “resisters.”  “Living in apartments no bigger than cells, or in decaying trailer homes, trying to decide whether to pay the heating or the electric bill or to actually buy a steak this month. Good Americans, hooking up with the woman at ResistUS, and calling themself Jael-Birds.”

The story of the investigation and the “event” planned by Hawkes and her group kept me reading into the night. Hawkes is a fascinating character, and her view of her mission is incredibly thought-provoking: “All she wanted was for people to recognize that she’d never had a chance and that seventy percent of them were the same way–people without a chance.”

I can’t wait for more of Letty’s adventures, and I am SO glad that Sandford is back in TOP form. FIVE STARS!