Certain Prey (Lucas Davenport #10)

This is one of my favorite books in this series! Lucas tries, but can’t quite catch up with Clara. Lucas, along with the “Feebs” as he refers to the FBI are run ragged by a mob hit woman, after a brilliant attorney, Carmel Loan, hires Clara to kill the wife of a co-worker that she’s convinced that she’s in love with.
Thus ensues a merry search for this proliferate hit woman…there’s plenty of action and comedy is sprinkled liberally throughout this engaging tale!!!

The protagonists were not believable I felt as if I were reading a comic book. Not a novel written by one of my favorite crime authors I hope this is not a sign of things to come. I had to leave this review bc I was so disappointed. I have mixed feelings about how he fleshes out some of his female leads. Often their character traits are annoying ,vulger and foul mouthed and really stretch ones imagination. Nasty unbelievable characters . I did purchase number 11. Hope it’s better

I am saying this a lot in these reviews: “Boy was this one different!” Well, it was, but it also was very good. Many people were killed in this story, which is normal for Sandford. There is a lot of blood, guts and sex. One thing that was surprising was that there was no mention of his friend/girlfriend/wife “Weather” even though this book followed Night Prey on my list (from Amazon’s Sandford list) where Lucas had just settled in with Weather in Minneapolis after meeting her in Wisconsin. They did mention he had a tracheatomy from a doctor who happened to be standing near when he got shot in the throat. In this story he works closely with Marcy, a cop and former girl friend and his usual old buddy Sloan. He was patched up in emergency rooms several times but Weather wasn’t around. He lives alone.

“Who dun it?” is not the question here. We find that out directly in the first few chapters that go by rather quickly. “How does Lucas keep getting mixed up with these pretty blonds?” is the more proper question. The story quickly resolves into the exploits of a pair of women bent on killing people. One is a professional mob hit-girl and the other is a well-to-do sexy lawyer who has a flair for killing people. We watch as they scheme to get various people, and then to get more who may have witnessed their kills, (almost including a 4-year-old girl) etc, etc. By pure chance Lucas even runs into the main hit girl and dances with her early in the book and then realizes it in the end of the book. They even like each other in a way, after she tries to kill him at his home and he defends himself almost successfully. She calls him to make sure he’s all right as she heads off into the next chapter of her life. Lucas and Marcy and the FBI have some trouble piecing everything together in the end. You almost have to go back through with a notebook in hand to work through who kills whom and why. I have no idea how many bodies resulted from the action described in this book. But most of Sandford’s books are like this. The action takes place in Minneapolis, St Paul, a cabin in northern Wisconsin, a bar in Wichita, an airport in Des Moines, an office building in Washington DC, a bank in Seattle and a bank in Philadelphia. So it is clear Sandford can write about places other than Minnesota. Now if Lucas could just learn to fly without fear. Taking flying lessons might help.

Start this book when you can read it without many interruptions.

I am an ardent John Sandford fan. I recently purchased and read the complete Prey series and then the complete Flowers series in order, and I’m only sorry I’ll have to wait for the next book in both series. Sandford is a novelist with the rare ability to carry over characters and plot elements with complete believabiity while allowing both to develop in interesting, unexpected but natural ways – the only other “serial” novelist who does this nearly as well is Anthony Trollope, and he avoids murders. I re-read these books with pleasure as great or greater than the first reading because the fast-paced narrative and unexpected plot developments pulls you to read fast the first time; the second or third you can pay attention to atmosphere (he’s great on significant landscape detail), character growth, and situation development. Sandford writes like a real novelist, not like someone trying to impress academia with his literary exclusivity.

This book starts well and then goes on and on and on and on and on…It reminds me of the Little Britain sketches parodying Barbara Cartland, played by Matt Lucas where she lies on a couch dictating her novels while her secretary types. She constantly asks the secretary ‘How many words, dear?’. If there’s not enough she then repeats phrases over and over and over again.

To be fair, I’ve always disliked detective whodunnit novels, but this is even worse because you know whodunnit and you just have to follow every tedious lead the detective, Lucas explores. It was so boring I just gave up about half way through – rubbish.

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