"Rough Country" (Putnam, 388 pages, $26.95), the third novel in Minnesota writer John Sandford's Virgil Flowers series, takes readers to the environs of Grand Rapids in northern Minnesota, where a string of murders roil the community. Detective Flowers is enjoying an idyllic vacation of muskie fishing on Vermilion Lake when he receives a phone call from Lucas Davenport, head of Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the star of Sandford's bestselling "Prey" series. That same morning, a nature guide discovered the body of Erica McDill, a big-shot Minneapolis advertising executive, shot while on a solo kayak trip on nearby Stone Lake. A reluctant Flowers is called in to aid local investigators, who are tied up with a search for a missing teenage girl. In a matter of hours, Flowers arrives at the Eagle's Nest, a resort on Stone Lake that caters exclusively to women. It doesn't take much digging before Flowers discovers a hotbed of office politics and unearths a cluster of romantic (primarily same-sex) entanglements.

Enter a panoply of characters under investigation -- from cleavage-scratching, partner-swapping country lesbians to superficial, swinging yuppies from the Twin Cities -- most of whom remain relatively unmoved by Flowers' bonhomie, charm and surfer-dude good looks. The majority of these minor players are stereotypes and Sandford effectively tells us which characters to dislike by sharing Virgil's reactions to them. Describing McDill's nearest and dearest, who deem a floatplane necessary to access the wilds of northern Minnesota, Sandford informs the reader: "All three, Virgil thought, after the introductions had been made and some questions answered, were intensely self-centered. They were not concerned about the existential aspects of McDill's death, but rather, what it means to me." Even Sandford's main characters are roughly drawn. "She was neat, tidy -- an accountant even in her household chores," Sandford writes of Zoe, Flowers' plucky lesbian sidekick. "The only place she wasn't an accountant, she thought ruefully, was in her sex life."

Sandford's simple, unvarnished prose reflects his newspaper reporter background. And like a good former police reporter, he chronicles the forensic details of the investigation. The novel is action-packed and fast-moving -- Sandford's short chapters, broken into sections, keep the plot clipping along and strip his story to the bare essentials. Humorous, diverting, rugged and occasionally crude, "Rough Country" is decidedly rough-hewn.

Megan Doll is a Minneapolitan living in New York City.