Rough Country

Rough Country is a crime novel by the American writer John Sandford, published in 2009. It is one of his books about Virgil Flowers, an investigator with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension who works the parts of the state that the cities do not like to think about.

Flowers is supposed to be spending his time competing in a fishing tournament in a remote part of northern Minnesota. The telephone call from Lucas Davenport takes him away from that and sends him to a resort where a woman has been killed while kayaking on the lake, which is not the kind of place or the kind of victim that usually produces this sort of case.

The resort is a retreat for women, catering to people who want to rest, get fit, recover from surgery or spend time in the woods, and the circumstances of the killing mean that the suspect list is made up almost entirely of people who were supposed to be on holiday. Flowers has to work out who on the premises had a reason to do it, in a setting where the local population is small, the guests are transitory and everyone has been careful about what they say to the police.