Certain Prey
book
Certain Preyis John Sandford's 11th novel in ten years, and the tenth to feature hard-edged, charismatic homicide detective Lucas Davenport. Once again, Sandford has managed to avoid the traps of repetition and over-familiarity that mar so many attempts to create an extended series and given us a shrewdly plotted, furiously paced novel that is as visceral and gripping as anything he has published to date. The opening chapters find Davenport in unusually placid circumstances. He is financially secure, having developed and sold a lucrative line of computer simulation software; he is enjoying a brief, atypical period of complete celibacy; and he is increasingly isolated from the life of the streets by the endless bureaucratic demands of his role as deputy chief of the Minneapolis Police Department. Reality, of course, soon intervenes, and Davenport is pulled down from his ivory tower by a vicious, execution-style killing and its unexpected aftermath. The killing is initiated by Carmel Loan, a sociopathic defense attorney with a million-dollar-a-year practice and a tendency to get what she wants. When she decides that she wants the handsome but unattainable husband of a wealthy local socialite named Barbara Allen, she hires the services of an out-of-town hit-woman named Clara Rinker, who successfully eliminates the inconvenient Allen but is also forced to shoot a Minneapolis police officer who stumbles onto the scene. From that point, events take on a life and momentum of their o