WICKED PREY
John Sandford
Putnam Adult
Thriller
ISBN: 9780399155673
John Sandford has been writing books for nearly 20 years. He has reached the point in his life where he could comfortably coast, succumbing to the temptation to follow a formula with his Davenport novels, keeping the masses of fans he has deservedly acquired over the years happy by presenting a Davenport title on an annual basis following the theory that the best surprise is no surprise. Instead, Sandford has taken a road less traveled but far more interesting. He has actually increased his output, spinning a new series off of the Davenport mythos, while maintaining not only frequency but also quality in his Prey series.
Wait a minute. Did I say “maintaining”? That would be wrong. Sandford sets and exceeds his own benchmarks, and with WICKED PREY presents his best and most ambitious novel to date.
Sandford sets WICKED PREY spinning along two tracks that intersect briefly but importantly before the end of the book. The first concerns a gang assembled in Minneapolis on the eve of the 2008 Republican National Convention. Aware that lobbyists will be clandestinely distributing cash for campaign use, the gang plans a series of quick hits to build a very large pot. If all goes according to plan, their road to unjust enrichment will end with a separate heist that will enable all of them to retire in style. Their only problem, however, is their leader, a criminal genius whose tragic flaw is a hair trigger temper that in turn leads to homicidal tendencies. Think Richard Stark’s Parker without the benevolent restraint and you’ll get the idea. The beauty of WICKED PREY is that Davenport gets a heads up on the gang’s presence in Minneapolis; he just doesn’t know the where or the when of their heists, at least not initially.
The result is a deadly game of cat-and-mouse carried out between Davenport and the police on one side and the gang on the other, with Davenport playing almost-but-not-quite catch-up, arriving on the scene a few seconds later and a few cents too short. When he figures out the gang’s ultimate target, however, it is due not so much to good police work as to a clue inadvertently provided by Letty West, who is soon to be adopted by Davenport and his wife Weather.
Ah, Letty. Watch out for that one. She is 14 years old, a bit precocious, yet vulnerable and more like Davenport than either would care to admit. It is Letty who plays a major role in the second but by no means lesser plot line of WICKED PREY. Randy Whitcomb is a petty thief turned pimp, a thoroughly despicable waste of air and skin whose permanent confinement to a wheelchair he blames on Davenport. Deciding to extract a pound of flesh from Davenport in revenge, he devises an extremely dangerous plan to kidnap Letty and hurt Davenport worse than he possibly could if he attacked him directly.
But Letty has crammed a good deal of life into 14 years, and possesses an intriguing combination of loyalty, toughness and street smarts. When she inadvertently learns of Whitcomb’s plan, Letty does not want to disturb Davenport with it, figuring he has enough to worry about. Instead, she begins to slowly but surely turn the tables on Whitcomb. It is not giving away anything to tell you that Whitcomb, though dangerous, is totally outclassed. Letty is not just any 14-year-old, and watching her plan slowly, surely and, yes, ruthlessly unfold is worth the price of admission all by itself.
I will say it again: WICKED PREY is Sandford’s best book. If you stopped reading him a while ago because you thought he had nothing left to say, you need to jump back on and then catch up on any of his backlist titles that you might have missed; otherwise you are cheating yourself. And one other thing: there is a paragraph, a little more than halfway through the novel, that concerns Davenport’s reaction to some very bad news. It is only about nine lines long and is absolutely perfect, possibly as good as the opening paragraph to THE LAST GOOD KISS by James Crumley. It rockets along so fast that you will literally be out of breath by the end of it. You’ll know it when you read it, but don’t skip ahead. You’ll miss so much, and this is one book that you don’t want to miss.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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