One of the best of Sandford’s Prey series.

The bad guy in this one is fascinating.

In fact, Sandford first decides on the villain. And then starts writing — trying to decide how Lucas Davenport could catch the serial killer.

An art history professor and writer and cheerful pervert, James Qatar had a hobby: he took secret photographs of women and turned them into highly sexual drawings.

One day, he took the hobby a step further and… well, one thing led to another, and he had to kill her. A man in his position couldn’t be too careful, after all. And you know something? He liked it.

Already faced with a welter of confusion in his personal life, Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport decides to take this case himself, hoping that some straightforward police work will clear his head, but as the trail begins to take some unexpected turns, it soon becomes clear that nothing is straightforward about this killer. The man is learning as he goes, Lucas realizes, taking great strides forward with each murder. He is becoming a monster — and Lucas may have no choice but to walk right into his lair…

Chosen Prey (2001)

Having now read most of his books, this is one of my favourites.

My Mom liked it too.

The chief justice of the Supreme Court is about to be defamed, his career destroyed, by a powerful gossip website that specializes in dirt on celebs and politicians. Their top reporter has written an exposé claiming that he had liaisons with an escort, a young woman prepared to tell the world her salacious tale. But the chief justice is not without allies and his greatest supporter is determined to stop the story in its tracks.

Nick Heller is a private spy—an intelligence operative based in Boston, hired by lawyers, politicians, and even foreign governments. A high-powered investigator with a penchant for doing things his own way, he’s called to Washington, DC, to help out in this delicate, potentially explosive situation.

Nick has just forty-eight hours to disprove the story about the chief justice. But when the call girl is found murdered, the case takes a dangerous turn, and Nick resolves to find the mastermind behind the conspiracy before anyone else falls victim to the maelstrom of political scandal and ruined reputations predicated upon one long-buried secret.

JosephFinder.com

Lethal Prey (2025) is 35th in the Lucas Davenport series. And one of the best.

For one thing, it includes Virgil Flowers — a far more likeable hero than Davenport.

For me, these books are “procedurals“. Long and frustrating investigations. The opposite of thrillers, where good guys are never hit by bullets and every scene is dramatic.

Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers join forces to track down a ruthless killer who will do whatever it takes to keep the past buried …

Doris Grandfelt, an employee at an accounting firm, was brutally stabbed to death… but nobody knew exactly where the crime took place.

Her body was found the next night, dumped among a dense thicket of trees along the edge of an urban park, eight miles east of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Despite her twin sister Lara Grandfelt’s persistent calls to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the killer was never found.

Twenty years later, Lara has been diagnosed with breast cancer. Confronted with the possibility of her own death, she’s determined to find Doris’s killer once and for all. Finally taking matters into her own hands, she dumps the entire investigative file on every true-crime site in the world and offers a $5 million reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest. Dozens of true-crime bloggers show up looking for both new evidence and clicks, and Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers are called in to review anything that might be a new lead.

JohnSandford.org

The 2024 edition of the Women’s Murder Club series had a promising start. Three separate threads:

• murder investigation of a billionaire San Francisco couple, one a former Olympic champion gymnast
• court case ➙ rape of a woman with dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities)
• cyberattacks targeting hospitals

Sadly, all 3 interesting stories are resolved unsatisfactorily.

Some big fans of the series called this the worst yet. And there are some DUMB books. 😀

​

It was nothing more than a one-night stand. Juliana Brody, a judge in the Superior Court of Massachusetts, is rumored to be in consideration for the federal circuit, maybe someday the highest court in the land.

At a conference in a Chicago hotel, she meets a gentle, vulnerable man and in a moment of weakness has an unforgettable night with him. They part with an explicit understanding that this must never happen again.

But back home in Boston, it becomes clear that this was no random encounter. The man from Chicago proves to have an integral role in a case she’s presiding over–a sex-discrimination case that’s received national attention. Juliana discovers that she’s been entrapped, her night of infidelity captured on video.

Strings are being pulled in high places, a terrifying unfolding conspiracy that will turn her life upside down. But soon it becomes clear that personal humiliation, even the possible destruction of her career, are the least of her concerns, as her own life and the lives of her family are put in mortal jeopardy.

In the end, turning the tables on her adversaries will require her to be as ruthless as they are.

JosephFinder.com

Mortal Prey is 13th in the long Lucas Davenport series. And one of the best.

The bad guy is a woman.

Lucas clashed with her in a previous book ➙ Certain Prey.

Years ago, Lucas Davenport almost died at the hands of Clara Rinker, a pleasant, soft-spoken, low-key Southerner, and the best hitwoman in the business.

Now retired and living in Mexico, she nearly dies herself when a sniper kills her boyfriend, the son of a local druglord, and while the boy’s father vows vengeance, Rinker knows something he doesn’t: The boy wasn’t the target — she was — and now she is going to have to disappear to find the killer herself.

The FBI and DEA draft Davenport to help track her down, and with his fiancée deep in wedding preparations, he’s really just as happy to go — but he has no idea what he’s getting into.

For Rinker is as unpredictable as ever, and between her, her old bosses in the St. Louis mob, the Mexican druglord, and the combined, sometimes warring, forces of U.S. law enforcement, this is one case that will get more dangerous as it goes along. And when the crossfire comes, anyone standing in the middle won’t stand a chance….