Extreme Prey by John Sandford

Reviewed by Gerti

Meet the latest author with whom I am obsessed! John Sandford is a gifted storyteller and his protagonist Lucas Davenport is every bit as thrilling as the renegade cop Harry Bosch created by Michael Connelly. And Sandford is proving to be an even more prolific writer, as he’s already cranked out 26 “Prey” novels, which is how you recognize this series when you see them on the library shelf.

“Extreme Prey” is the perfect story for this election year, as there is a strong female candidate running for president, and just like with Hillary Clinton, there are those fanatics out there who dislike her strongly. Members of one family dislike her enough to want to kill her, and when the radical group they are part of refuses to back any so-called “direct action”, Marlys Purdy and her son Cole prepare to do it on their own. And they’ve got the skills – Cole is a former military man who not only can shoot any number of weapons accurately, but he is also able to construct an IED. Candidate Michaela (Mike) Bowden is alerted to the threat, but she’s counting on Davenport to neutralize it before she walks unguarded around the Iowa State Fair.

Although Davenport is originally from Minnesota, he makes himself at home in the politically active state of Iowa, and gets help from all sorts of police agencies as he tracks down the attempted assassins. He’s got a number of other crimes to solve, too, as the leader of one radical organization, the Progressive People’s Party of Iowa (and his girlfriend) die when the Purdy’s see them as threats. Another PPPI org member knows too much about a dairy bombing decades earlier, and he also gets iced. His death is the work of another group member (who has her own reasons for the murder). Davenport interviews a ton of people, and it’s only Sandford’s clever writing and the fact that Davenport is such a brilliant but likeable scoundrel that keeps it all flowing.

Finally the day of the fair arrives, and although Davenport knows his chief suspects by sight, they allude him and set up camp before he gets there. Then it’s a race against time before the bloodbath begins. I won’t ruin the ending for you, but I will say it is worth reading, as every Sandford book I’ve touched seems to be so far. The ending is even a little ironic, as good and bad people die, yet no one second guesses the candidate on her decision to attend the Fair even though it cost innocent bystanders their lives. The reader is left with a moral question about where the fault for their death lies. Of course the assassins did their damage, but if Bowden hadn’t been stubborn and insisted on going to the event for PR reasons, blameless people would not have been injured or died.

Sandford is clever and his plots are intricate. His characters seem real, whether he’s writing about the police detectives, the politicians, or the people who lives on hard-scrabble farms. Don’t miss “Extreme Prey”! It’s a page-turner!