Book review: How does he do it? John Sandford's 'Holy Ghost' is another winner.

"Holy Ghost" by John Sandford; Putnam; 384 pages

Virgil Flowers, an agent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, is one of the few series detectives to have a Homeric epithet - no, make that a bawdy Chaucerian epithet. "F---ing Flowers," his colleagues call him, in honor of his ability to cut corners and get away with it. One of Virgil's favorite moves is to sneak into a suspect's house without obtaining a search warrant, uncover damning evidence, then trick the perp into incriminating himself in a fashion that will hold up in court.

This tactic came off beautifully in John Sandford's brilliant but harrowing "Bad Blood" (2010), the fourth of his Flowers novels and perhaps the darkest, with Virgil taking on a religious cult centered on the sexual exploitation of minors. Virgil sneaks again in "Holy Ghost," the 11th and newest in the series, but the crimes he investigates are less shocking.

As the story opens, two unlikely pals - Wardell Holland, an Afghanistan War vet who is mayor of small, economically depressed Wheatfield, Minn., and John Jacob Skinner, a precocious 17-year-old high school student - agree to collaborate on a civic renewal project. With the help of playacting by a woman who sleeps with Skinner from time to time, they will fake apparitions of the Virgin in the local Catholic church and see if the "miracles" don't turn the town's fortunes around - as indeed they do.

Inasmuch as the mayor and the kid open a store, Skinner & Holland, Eats & Souvenirs, almost immediately after the first apparition, a cynic might smell something fishy. But with Wheatfield's economy recovering - so many pilgrims stream through that a vacant hotel room or a free table at a restaurant is hard to come by - the cynics tend to pinch their nostrils shut and breathe through their mouths.

Then comes trouble. A pedestrian on the town's main street is shot by an unseen sniper. A few days later, it happens again. Called in to investigate, Virgil quickly realizes what is at stake. As a local informant explains, speaking of himself and his wife, "We're not Catholics, but that church saved the town. Everybody knows that. This crazy man could send us back to the poorhouse."

As Virgil talks to more townspeople, he is struck by two oddities. Nobody seems to have heard the shots, and neither of them was fatal, one victim being hit in the leg, the other in the hip. As for the apparitions, Virgil suspects "there would have been no shootings without [them], but the immediate cause of the shootings was something else."

It's a good mystery, embellished with byplay and banter between Virgil and his allies. After Virgil identifies a yellow smudge on a letter that might be a clue as the residue of Cheetos, Skinner corrects him. "Cheez-Its. There's a subtle difference in the yellow grease, as you'd know if you worked in the store."

And there is a running food joke. Wheatfield's restaurants serve such bad grub that one cop after another adopts Virgil's solution. Buy a frozen potpie from Holland & Skinner, have them nuke it, and dig in. By the end of the novel, all the cops are logy from eating so many potpies.

My one complaint is that Sandford never lets us in on how the apparitions are produced. Sure, the pilgrims' gullibility makes the task easy, but the impresarios must be doing something technically and artistically right, and it would have been nice to go backstage with them.

Sandford's real name is John Roswell Camp. He is former newspaper reporter and, as a novelist, something of a phenomenon. Books pour out of him at such a dizzying rate - besides the Flowers mysteries, there are the 29 Prey novels featuring detective Lucas Davenport, as well as another dozen or so books - and at such a dependably high level that Sandford belongs in the heady company of the late, prolific Ruth Rendell.