Another in a series of Lucas Davenport. Very good. Revenge of wife's killing by Lucas in bank robbery leads to friends & colleagues being stalked and hunted.

No one knows how to take apart a cop's family by death and grief like John Sandford. I melted when one by one they died. It was a hideous plot. Good job. ( )

And a man who injures his countryman – as he has done, so it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Just as he has injured a person, so it shall be done to him. ( )

This wasn't that great. I think the biggest problem is that we stayed too focused on the people who were hunting Lucas and his detectives down. I also really started to loathe the doctors, reporters, and heck even Weather questioning Lucas as if it was his fault that two women who were robbing a bank, and killed someone, were set up to die by Lucas. Lucas isn't God and them acting as if he is some great manipulator didn't come through at all to me in this book.

"Sudden Prey" has Lucas doing what he can to protect Weather, his daughter, and his ex-lover and her family from a group of men who are out to kill them and any cops that they blame for the death of two female bank robbers. One of the women who was killed, has a husband (LaChaise) who swears an eye for an eye. You know that this people are off their rocker to go out and try to take out cops and their families. Soon enough the police are in a siege mentality trying to keep themselves and their loved ones safe while trying to track down the bad guys.

I have to say that the writing was okay, but more lop-sided in this one. We stayed too long with LaChaise and his stupidity to keep coming back to kill Lucas and associates made zero sense. I also want to know how the cops kept missing the guy after a while. I also got fed up with Weather being an idiot about staying in the safe motel they all were at even after people are murdered and spouses are left in the hospital. It didn't ring true at all. We do finally have Jennifer reappearing in this one and we see Lucas's daughter too. We also get some dialogue that shows that Weather has met Lucas's daughter. Jennifer tries warning Weather about how Lucas is inside and you get some foreshadowing about their relationship.

The ending was a bit much in my opinion. It just didn't ring as realistic at all. And I had zero sympathy for LaChasie. ( )

"Shoulda bought me them Big Macs."
Now, if it had been me, I would have definitely taken Richard "Dick" LaChaise to MacDonald's. Not necessarily for the company, though.

This is what I would boldly label as a Damned Good Book. Logical, wonderfully-paced suspense, memorable characters (Del Capslock is legendary, in my book) - a really neat, exemplary thriller. Sandford manipulates his variables with scientific precision; take the sentence length, for instance: short, explosive sentences to mark a character's panicked train of thought vs. floaty, descriptive, yet economical combinations that serve to suspend a significant moment in time, take the reader's breath away in a firm grip - the silence after a shot as snowflakes slowly, moodily fill the blank where sound and light had been.
As it often comes to pass with fishing, I came across the volume by sheer happenstance, and I can only hope it will happen again with more titles in the Davenport series (a rather likeable chap, Davenport).
Bonus information: my copy smells really nice. ( )