Night Prey (1994 original; edició 2011)

Minnesota has more than it's fair share of weirdos. ( )

Wow. Night Prey grabs and doesn't let you go. Lucas is now back working as Deputy Chief in Minnesota and is asked to wade in when it appears that a serial killer is murdering women in a brutal way. What I liked was that we get a female protagonist (Meagan Connell) in this one who doesn't have time for Lucas's BS and who wants to capture the serial killer before she dies from cancer. Lucas is still with Weather and they are just on the cusp of deciding what the next step in their relationship is going to be. The only thing that bugs me is that we know Lucas has a daughter, she is just randomly discussed, but it doesn't appear he has much of a relationship with her. The way Weather is written, it just seems odd that she wouldn't have said anything about it.

"Night Prey" has Lucas still being himself. He notices beautiful women, but he is heads over heels in love with his current live in girlfriend Weather and he just likes her. It makes me think a bit of Ben and Leslie on Parks and Recreation. They not only love each other, but like each other. Weather also has her own things going on (she's a surgeon) so she isn't just sitting around and waiting for Lucas to come home.

We get introduced to characters we are going to be following for a long time in this series, like Del. I loved everyone we get to meet. They are wisecracking and often rude, but they love each other and want to do what they can to keep criminals off the street. Lucas is a bit slower in this one. Since he's been gone from the police force he doesn't know where people are and or what happened to them. And he was actually decent in this one when he goes to look up a former criminal who they think may be connected to the case, but see that he is broken down and needs to be taken care of. I also liked that Lucas is trying to mentor a younger detective and is dealing with a locked room mystery. With the serial killings and this, you have a lot going on.

The serial killer in this one, Koop, is probably one of the scariest that Davenport has gone up against. Also I was curious about Koop due to him being a cat burglar who decides he has fallen in "love" with one of his victims.

The book returns to Minnesota and here Davenport and Sandford feel like they are on more solid ground.

The ending was explosive and sad, but I liked how everything played out. ( )

This one is sixth in the series, written by John Camp under the Sandford pseudonym. I prefer the earlier Lucas Davenports to the later ones. Sandford’s other series, I like even better, especially Virgil Flowers, which has a special brand of humor. The Kidd series suffers from being quite dated technically, when read today, but were excellent when I read them several years (decades?) ago.

It’s a good story, although I found Conley’s terminal disease to be implausible in the context of her actions in the story, not to mention Lucas’s little oration on the degrees of rape. That was weird. ( )

The sixth Lucas Davenport novel and the first that wasn’t a complete success. The core story was of the quality I have come to expect but there was an offshoot to the investigation that was pure filler. I can forgive it because of Sandford’s other strengths. Davenport is forced to partner with a female investigator who is terminally ill. How she deals with her problem and how Davenport relates to her throughout the process--while conducting an extremely public investigation--is the essence of the story. It reduces the extraneous stuff to a minor distraction. ( )

Night Prey is the 6th in John Sanford's Prey series. Lucas Davenport is on the trail of a serial killer whose body count continues to rise. He's teamed with feminist Megan Connell of the State Bureau of Criminal Apprenhension. Connell is obsessed with catching the killer before she dies of cancer. Another page turner in a thrilling series that ends the only way it could. ( )