Book: Winter Prey by John Sandford


Good cop thriller

John Sandford
Winter Prey
Berkley, 1994
ISBN: 0-425-14123-3
$7.99
343 pages

There isn't a whole lot to say about Winter Prey that I haven't said already about Mr Sandford's Prey novels in general. In this book Lucas Davenport is not in Minneapolis; he has left the Minneapolis police department (he'll return later in the series) and he's staying at his cabin in rural northern Wisconsin. A sheriff from a nearby county asks him to help with a murder investigation. It seems that two people have been killed and their house set on fire. That's not the sort of thing that happens much there.

As usual, there are more murders and, as usual, Davenport is effective and not always particularly nice. Mr Sandford's Prey novels are reliably good and Winter Prey is no exception.

In this novel we meet Weather Karkinnen who is a surgeon from the area. She will be Davenport's sometime girlfriend in later books. As the book's title suggests, it's set in the middle of winter and, while I try to stay indoors as much as possible when the weather is like what Mr Sandford describes, I think his descriptions of winter when it's very cold are quite good. You might prefer to read Winter Prey in the middle of summer rather than as fall is closing in.

I noticed two minor errors. Mr Sandford has "guppie" where he wants "guppy" (p. 119). And if you get your hands extremely cold and then run hot water over them, you're much more likely to shout "OW!" than to have your mind to drift (p. 35).

Posted: Sat - October 9, 2004 at 06:58   Main   Category: 

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