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Summary
Summary
A prolific author of rare skills, John Sandford enjoys a near-permanent place on the New York Times best-seller list. Storm Prey features one of the author's most beloved creations, Lucas Davenport, in a tale as hard hitting as it is compulsively readable. ". ingenious plots, vivid characters, crisp dialogue and endless surprises."-Washington Post on the novels of John Sandford
Author Notes
John Sandford was born John Roswell Camp on February 23, 1944 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Before entering the U.S. Army and serving in Korea, he received a bachelor's degree in American history from the University of Iowa in 1966. After leaving the service, he received a master's degree in journalism from the University of Iowa.
During the 1970s, he worked at The Miami Herald, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In 1985, he began researching the lives of a farm family caught in the midst of the crisis of American farming. The article, Life on the Land: An American Farm Family, won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Non-Deadline Feature Writing.
After winning the Pulitzer Prize, he began writing fiction. His works include the Prey series, the Virgil Flowers series, and The Singular Menace series. He has also written nonfiction works on plastic surgery and art.
Sandford's Young Adult novels, Uncaged and Outrage, Books 1 and 2 of The Singular Menace Series co-written with Michelle Cook, made the New York Times Bestseller list in July 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of bestseller Sandford's superb 20th Lucas Davenport thriller (after Wicked Prey), the getaway vehicle from a botched early morning robbery, which results in a pharmacy employee's death, almost collides with the car driven by Lucas's surgeon wife, Weather Karkinnen. Weather, who was on her way to work at the Minnesota Medical Research Center, becomes a key witness. Sandford masterfully handles both sides of the equation as the thieves-planner Lyle Mack, his brother, Joe, and their henchmen-work to cover their crime. The investigation belongs to Minneapolis deputy chief Marcy Sherrill, but Lucas of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension pulls out all the stops to protect his wife. Sandford creates additional drama throughout as Weather and a skilled team of doctors perform an operation to separate twins joined at the skull. Sharply drawn characters, intricate plotting, and smooth dialogue make this a sure-fire winner. 500,000 first printing; author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Despite its inaccurate, generic and dumb titlewhat's next, Murder Prey?Lucas Davenport's 20th case is one of his best."We don't hurt anyone," Lyle Mack tells his brother Joe and their biker buddies Mikey Haines and Shooter Chapman as he conducts one last on-site review of their plans to rob the pharmacy in the Minneapolis Medical Center. But despite the thieves' success, Haines's temper gets away from him, and he kicks pharmacist Don Peterson to death. Even worse, their car is spotted by a witness who gets a good look at Joe as they're leaving the parking garage. Worst of all, the witness is Dr. Weather Karkinnen, a reconstructive surgeon who goes home each night from her demanding jobwhich these days involves surgery to separate a pair of 18-month-old twins joined at the headto the arms of Lucas Davenport, her husband. Since the cops have one way of identifying Haines, whose victim managed to get some of his killer's blood under his fingernails before he bled out, and another of identifying Joe, the conspirators have every incentive to cut telltale ends short, even if those telltale ends include each other. None of them is very smart, and Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension would probably have them under lock and key by nightfall if they only stood pat. Instead, however, Lyle calls on Cappy Garner, a friend with some experience as a hit man even though he's not old enough to buy a beer, and then the fireworks begin. By the time Sandford calls it quits, eight more cast members will be dead, and virtually all the survivors will have been stalked, chased, shot at or otherwise menaced by all manner of tough guys. And by the time those two twins are finally separated, the one new relationship that will have blossomed is an unlikely friendship between an aspiring killer and his mentor.Razor-sharp dialogue, a tautly controlled pace and enough homicides for a miniseries. What more could fans want?]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
It was an inside job, and it should have been easy. Rob the pharmacy at Minneapolis' largest hospital: in, out, wait till things cool down, and then sell the drugs for a half million or so. But the old man had to be a hero. Who knew he'd be on blood thinners and die after he was kicked? A robbery turned murder means Lucas Davenport and his Bureau of Criminal Apprehension team are called in to assist the investigation. There's another element to the case for Davenport: his wife, Weather, a surgeon at the hospital, may be able to identify one of the killers. The case starts to escalate. An attempt is made on Weather's life. The bodies of two motorcycle gang members are found in a rural area. Davenport guesses the gang is imploding from the pressure and murdering its members. Weather, under 24-hour guard, is part of a surgical team working to separate conjoined twins in a procedure that's captured the attention of the world's media. Meanwhile, Davenport and his team keep finding bodies of likely robbers but can't seem to isolate either the brains behind the theft or the hospital insider who pointed them at the pharmacy. The twenty-second Prey novel includes most of the elements readers expect: sharp plot, snappy dialogue, and believable action, but the background playfulness and gallows humor that usually fill in the gaps are in short supply. But hey, that's nitpicking. On balance, this is another fine entry in a wildly popular series.--Lukowsky, Wes Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Thomas Perry, that smiling sadist who gets his kicks from outfoxing readers, is at his wicked best in strip (Otto Penzler/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26). Like any self-respecting gangland thriller, this witty specimen has a cast of touchy mobsters killing one another over money and turf and petty grievances. But because a devious mind is manipulating the genre conventions - allowing unpredictable characters rather than precision-tooled action to drive his story - the rules of the game are constantly changing. The initial setup couldn't be sweeter. Manco Kapak, who owns some strip clubs in Los Angeles and moves a little money for a major drug distributor, is personally affronted when a masked gunman holds him up while he is making a bank deposit, robbing him of a night's take. The money is nothing, but the insult cuts deep, and in short order the hunt is on for an out-of-towner named Joe Carver who had nothing to do with the crime but can't persuade the irascible Kapak to call off the dogs. Once we're comfortable with these ground rules (innocent man, up against a ruthless gangster, using his wits to stay alive) Perry pulls a switch. Although blameless, Carver is anything but harmless, and after failing to negotiate a truce with his enemy, he sets out to destroy him. Kapak, meanwhile, becomes more sympathetic by the minute, mainly by treating everyone on his staff, from trigger-happy bodyguards to weary strippers, with uncommon decency. By the time Perry polishes up his portrait, this aging and exhausted skin merchant resembles an honorable but fatally flawed king who stands to lose his entire realm because of a tragic error in judgment. And the wonderful characters keep on coming, activated by greed and open to opportunity: the faithful functionary who finally initiates a plan of his own; the superstitious killers who suspect that the boss is under a curse; the charmed robber who loses his luck when he hooks up with a wild babe thirsting for adventure; the bigamous police detective desperate for a way to finance the college educations of his five children; the nice waitress who could be Kapak's last chance for love. And let's not forget that man of mystery, Joe Carver. They may all start off as familiar types, but once Perry lets them loose, they refuse to go back in the box. At one time, part of Kansas was under a vast inland sea "with prehistoric sharks and other seafaring creatures," Nancy Pickard tells us in THE SCENT OF RAIN AND LIGHTNING (Ballantine, $25). Today only a towering formation known as Testament Rocks marks the spot. This is where Jody Linder comes to commune with her mother, who disappeared when Jody was 3 - on the same night the child's father was shot to death. After the no-good ranch hand who went to prison for the crime is released, Jody's uncles try to soften the blow, but it's far too late. The symbolism gets a bit heavy, with Jody likening herself to an amateur archaeologist engaged in the "macabre hobby" of digging around Testament Rocks for her mother's bones. Still, Pickard has the storytelling gift. Working with dramatic descriptions of the deep darkness of the plains and the pounding storms that turn the skies black, she offers a sober account of the cattle-ranching families who have survived for generations by keeping their secrets close and their guns handy. The plot structure of John Sandford's 20th Lucas Davenport novel, STORM PREY (Putnam, $27.95), is a beautiful thing to behold. The sturdy scaffolding, designed to support two interconnecting story lines, allows readers to follow both the misadventures of an incompetent gang of thieves, who inadvertently kill a pharmacy worker when they break into a hospital to steal drugs, and a complicated medical procedure to separate conjoined twins. Bridging these narratives is the panicked thieves' scheme to eliminate the only witness to their crime, a surgeon on the operating team who happens to be married to the detective charged with solving the case. But the pretty construction job isn't all bricks and mortar. Sandford invests the villains with enough psychotic quirks to keep the action fast, jumpy and violent. And while none of the white hats can match the perverse appeal of a 20-year-old killer biker whose crazy father named him after a 1982 Chevy Caprice, that delicate operation is every bit as intense as all the other daredevil stunts in this manhunt. Nicci Gerrard and Sean French normally turn out sophisticated psychological thrillers when they write as Nicci French. But they mistake mannerism for cleverness in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR (Minotaur, $25.99), a labored exercise in split-focus storytelling. Chopped up into scenes designated "Before" and "After," the narrative opens with a music teacher named Bonnie standing over a corpse and invites us to guess the identity of the victim and the role Bonnie played in his demise. There's a certain awkward charm to the "Before" scenes, in which she assembles a group of musical misfits to play in a bluegrass band, but not enough to keep disbelief at bay. Not when the heroine asks a not-so-close friend to help her get rid of the body and the dialogue goes like this. Heroine: "Do you want to know what happened?" Friend: "Do you want to tell me?" Heroine: "Not yet." Friend: "Then wait." To which the only reader response must be: "Well, take your time, ladies, and turn out the lights when you're done." Thomas Perry's thriller has a cast of touchy gangsters killing one another over money and turf.
Library Journal Review
No. 1 New York Times best-selling writer Sandford's (www.johnsandford.org) 20th Lucas Davenport thriller follows Wicked Prey (2009), also available from Recorded Books/Penguin Audio. In it, Lucas's wife, surgeon Weather Karkinnen, finds her life on the line when she witnesses the fleeing perpetrators of a drug robbery gone wrong. Actor/Audie Award winner Richard Ferrone, who narrates earlier titles in this series, does an excellent job of reading this latest entry, making the various characters' multifaceted personalities easily discernable through his nuanced tones, accents, and voices. Thriller fans and anyone liking Sandford's other works are sure to enjoy. ["This fast-paced crime novel...will have readers dead-bolting their doors for weeks," read the review of the New York Times best-selling Putnam hc, LJ 4/15/10.-Ed.]-Ilka Gordon, Siegal Coll. of Judaic Studies Lib., Cleveland (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.