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A review by topdragon
Rules of Prey by John Sandford
4.0
I’ve been meaning to try this series for years now, especially since I joined Goodreads and been on the receiving end of much pestering from my GR friends. Of course that’s what friends are for and I am thankful that all of your pestering finally reached critical mass and pushed me over the edge.
I’ve read many a serial killer novel over the years and while I usually still find them at least somewhat interesting, they have tended to blur together in my memory. So to stand out from the crowd I need several key ingredients in any new ones I pick up. Foremost, there needs to be a unique main character. Lucas Davenport certainly fulfills that requirement. Instead of a cliched down and out alcoholic sleuth we have a tough police Lieutenant with a get-it-done reputation. A bit of a rogue and most definitely a womanizer, he likes nothing better than a new perfectly-tailored suit. He is also a man after my own heart: a gamer and even a game designer and has become quite wealthy through a number of pursuits. He is not above using other people, even innocent people to obtain his goals and even more importantly, he doesn’t just bend the rules, he flat out breaks them. He is a vigilante policeman who believes the ends justify the means and doesn’t bat an eye at planting evidence or falsifying facts to make sure the bad guy goes down. Such a character is not always sympathetic but somehow, this author manages to make him so, nonetheless. And that, my friends, makes this book, and presumably, this series, a worthwhile read.
The setting is the twin cities of Minneapolis/St Paul, also unique to my experience. I get tired of these sorts of novels always taking place in New York, LA or Washington DC. As a reporter and columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press for many years, John Sandford (real name John Camp) brings an air of authenticity to this locale and the plot in general. He knows what a crime scene looks like and how the press, the cops, and the public at large react to such things. Fortunately, he doesn’t “write like a journalist”. This is a gripping page-turner of a book.
There is not much of a downside here except for the feeling I got at the end that Davenport himself never changed throughout the novel. He didn’t grow or change in any measurable way. I suspect that is not the case over the course of the series otherwise there is no way it could be so successful after 25 novels and still going strong. The bad guy was intelligent, yes, and is known to the reader from near the beginning of the book (this is a thriller, not a mystery) but for a “smart” fellow he made plenty of mistakes. Thankfully, the plot’s realism depicted luck as a very real part of the way cops catch (or don’t catch) bad guys and here, the police’s lucky and unlucky breaks matched those of the villain so the story absolutely worked.
I’ll be reading more of this series of course and I am intrigued by John Sandford’s style enough to investigate his other series as well.
I’ve read many a serial killer novel over the years and while I usually still find them at least somewhat interesting, they have tended to blur together in my memory. So to stand out from the crowd I need several key ingredients in any new ones I pick up. Foremost, there needs to be a unique main character. Lucas Davenport certainly fulfills that requirement. Instead of a cliched down and out alcoholic sleuth we have a tough police Lieutenant with a get-it-done reputation. A bit of a rogue and most definitely a womanizer, he likes nothing better than a new perfectly-tailored suit. He is also a man after my own heart: a gamer and even a game designer and has become quite wealthy through a number of pursuits. He is not above using other people, even innocent people to obtain his goals and even more importantly, he doesn’t just bend the rules, he flat out breaks them. He is a vigilante policeman who believes the ends justify the means and doesn’t bat an eye at planting evidence or falsifying facts to make sure the bad guy goes down. Such a character is not always sympathetic but somehow, this author manages to make him so, nonetheless. And that, my friends, makes this book, and presumably, this series, a worthwhile read.
The setting is the twin cities of Minneapolis/St Paul, also unique to my experience. I get tired of these sorts of novels always taking place in New York, LA or Washington DC. As a reporter and columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press for many years, John Sandford (real name John Camp) brings an air of authenticity to this locale and the plot in general. He knows what a crime scene looks like and how the press, the cops, and the public at large react to such things. Fortunately, he doesn’t “write like a journalist”. This is a gripping page-turner of a book.
There is not much of a downside here except for the feeling I got at the end that Davenport himself never changed throughout the novel. He didn’t grow or change in any measurable way. I suspect that is not the case over the course of the series otherwise there is no way it could be so successful after 25 novels and still going strong. The bad guy was intelligent, yes, and is known to the reader from near the beginning of the book (this is a thriller, not a mystery) but for a “smart” fellow he made plenty of mistakes. Thankfully, the plot’s realism depicted luck as a very real part of the way cops catch (or don’t catch) bad guys and here, the police’s lucky and unlucky breaks matched those of the villain so the story absolutely worked.
I’ll be reading more of this series of course and I am intrigued by John Sandford’s style enough to investigate his other series as well.