Books: John Sandford's Prey novels


John Sandford's Prey novels are reliably good cop thrillers

John Sandford is a pseudonym of the former journalist John Camp. He has written a series of detective novels all of which have the word prey in their titles (Rules of Prey, Shadow Prey, Eyes of Prey, etc) and in which the detective is Lucas Davenport. I've read 10 of them and they're reliably quite good cop thrillers.

In the books, Lucas Davenport works for the Minneapolis police department, so there's a bit of extra fun for me since he sometimes chases people around places I know. Davenport isn't always a very nice person. Among other things, he often kills the criminals when he could safely arrest them and send them to trial. But these are cop thrillers with a hero who's meant to be imperfect, not essays on ethics. The criminals in the novels are routinely serial murderers and are quite satisfyingly evil. Davenport catches them in appropriately clever ways and under appropriately thrilling circumstances.

The books aren't great literature, but that's just fine. Sometimes I'm in the mood for a book with literary aspirations, just as I'm sometimes in the mood for elaborate cooking. And I'm sometimes in the mood for a cheeseburger. Mr Sandford's Prey novels are darned good cheeseburgers.

Posted: Tue - December 9, 2003 at 09:00   Main   Category: 

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