![]() ![]() The subplot to Davenport's relentless pursuit of the killer is his home life. He also seems to be there to borrow some bestseller karma off of Davenport, since his own series has not been as successful. Kidd is ostensibly called in to help the beleaguered cops understand the killer's artistic inclinations. The author's tactic of plunging Davenport into a foreign industry (in his previous novel, "Easy Prey," it was the fashion world), makes for a convenient contrivance: the crossover of the protagonist from his other series, an artist named Kidd, who is introduced with the same college-jock background as Davenport, and who proceeds to bed Marcy Sherrill in less a hundred pages. The hunt, which Sandford obviously enjoys plotting, sends the good guys careening all over Minnesota, chasing red herrings in the sex industry and art classes. Marshall enters the scene because a body with the killer's MO washed up on his rural beat, with the added bonus that it was Marshall's niece. "Marshall didn't look anything like Lennon he looked like something that would have eaten Lennon," Sandford writes. As has become standard procedure, Davenport's team is joined by an outsider, this one a state officer with the apt name of Marshall, a bespectacled country cop whose John Lennon glasses do nothing to tame his elemental presence. Meanwhile, Davenport plants stories to flush the killer out from above while working his contacts from below.Īs usual, Davenport is backed by a stalwart and long-suffering crew of Minneapolis cops, including disheveled undercover officer Del Capslock and former lover Marcy Sherrill. Television reporter Jennifer Carey, mother of his illegitimate daughter, makes a cameo in the book with the line, "Why don't we get your handcuffs and find an empty van?" Hubba, hubba. The chief of police, a bedraggled postfeminist icon named Rose Marie Roux, assigns Davenport to work the case, fearing public crucifixion of the department by an ever-influential media corps.ĭavenport's pull with the press is as magnetic as ever. In the case of "Chosen Prey," it's an art history professor, James Qatar, who takes secret photographs of women and turns them into pornographic drawings. There's a sociopathic killer, usually - but not exclusively - a man preying on women, who makes his MO known to Minneapolis authorities. Sandford's twelfth "Prey" novel deviates little from his now established formula. And oh, yes, he regularly manages to score with an average of two women per novel - while escaping marriage or lasting commitment. ![]() He periodically gets to beat bad guys to a pulp (or kill them) while miraculously escaping the usual recriminations. He has cashed in on the economic free-for-all of the 1990s, turning a fantasy gaming hobby into a multimillion-dollar corporate IPO. He has his own personal network of informants throughout the Twin Cities, trading favors for tips as he courts the media and hunts down the region's most violent offenders. ![]() It's a job which allows him to use the resources of the Minneapolis Police Department while operating just outside its legal boundaries - since, after all, he previously used excessive force on a suspect in custody and was kicked off the force.ĭavenport is an idealized, bigger-than-life crime stopper. 45 - has managed to work his way up the ladder to a cozy political position in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the course of several bestsellers, this character - a sort of roguish Midwestern knight errant with a. (CNN) - If there were a poster child in detective fiction for a man who gets to have his cake and eat it too, it would be Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport, protagonist of John Sandford's wildly successful "Prey" series. ![]()
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