Judgement Prey

This is the 33rd novel featuring Lucas Davenport, a detective currently working for the Marshal’s office in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Readers get a bonus in the form of Virgil Flowers, who also has his own series of a dozen or so thrillers.

The two are called in to assist the various local and federal crime agencies when Judge Sand and his two teenage sons are shot down and killed in their own home. The event is recorded on CCTV, but the perpetrator was well-concealed, and there is minimal direct evidence.

As usual, Davenport and Flowers find routes for inquiry which other detectives have overlooked. They pick up that Sand’s wife Cooper has a relationship with another woman. They push into Sand’s charitable work and find people who have an adverse interest in his well-being. They are sensitive enough to Cooper’s reactions to discern that she suspects someone she has not mentioned to the police.

It would hardly be a spoiler to reveal that their focus and drive eventually produce results. What’s more, they uncover a second, linked but separate, web of criminality, which sets off more murders. Again, the pair figure out what is going on well ahead of their colleagues.

For those familiar with John Sandford, his protagonists are as engaging as ever, and carry an entertainment value equal or better to that of previous outings, despite grey hairs and the odd bullet wound. There is a bit of misdirection to keep the reader guessing on a few matters, but for most of the book the activities of both sides are open to view, as is typical for the author.

For those who have not heard of Sandford or have resisted the impulse to pick up one of his, I can only urge you to lay your hands on this or one of its forerunners without delay. Davenport is free of the angst which haunts so many fictional detectives – he’s a bit of a clothes horse, happily married and reasonably wealthy from designing computer programmes.

Not too much there to grab your interest, you may think. But you’d be wrong. The investigation process is precisely directed, and carried forward with such intensity, with Davenport’s associates competent and mainly pulling in the same direction. Wrongdoers are depicted so well they are completely convincing. And the dialogue between the characters has got tremendous sparkle and wit, and is genuinely funny. Like life on a good day, possibly, only maybe 99 per cent better.