Another intense murder mystery.

16th in the Lucas Davenport series.

Very good as are most of the Sandford novels.

The first body is of a young woman, found on a Minneapolis riverbank, her throat cut, her body scourged and put on display. Whoever did this, Lucas knows, is pushed by brain chemistry, there is something wrong with him. This isn’t a bad love affair.

The second body is found a week later, in a farmhouse six miles south. Same condition, same display — except this time it is a man. Nothing to link the two murders, nothing to indicate that the killings end here. …

A suspect emerges early: a man recently released from a prison hospital and who now seems to have cut himself free from his court-imposed ankle bracelet and disappeared. But the more Lucas investigates, the more he wonders: Is this really the man? Could he really have done this all by himself? And where has he gone to, anyway?

And meanwhile, a predator waits….