it was amazing

The debut book in John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport series, Rules of Prey, was expertly done but still really just a high grade Thomas Harris knockoff with all the expected trimmings: ingeniously loopy serial killer, obsessed and messed-up detective hero, twisty plot full of investigative arcana. The follow-up, Shadow Prey, was something entirely different. Sandford, a former newspaper reporter, used his knowledge of the Indian population in and around Minneapolis to create a villain (or villains) with something like a legitimate grievance, and a larger plan that’s both ingenious and horribly poetic. In his new introduction for this paperback edition, Sandford notes that it is probably the least popular entry in his “Prey” series, but I think it’s second only to Secret Prey in terms of plotting and interesting psychology. One of the later novels, Sudden Prey, similarly uses a team of villains with understandable motives of vengeance, though to less telling effect.

Steven‘s Goodreads review Feb 18, 2009