![]() Butters and Martin feel like characters who what they do because the author needed them to, not because they had much in the way of especially credible reason to do it. ![]() It might seem like a small thing on its surface, but it makes an important aspect of the premise feel contrived. They just do it–set out to systematically shoot cops and their families–and for what? That question is never convincingly answered to my recollection. There was never supposed to be any money, girls, or other reward. The other two men do unimaginable things and end up willingly giving their lives to a cause they have no direct stake in. But he can’t do it alone, and the involvement of Butters and Martin, while interesting, seems flimsy because Dick is the only one with a personal stake in the revenge that drives the story. If it were just LaChaise, this motive would probably hold up a lot better. But by the end of the book they’re on what pretty much amounts to a suicide mission that’s motivated solely by revenge. One issue I have with this story is that we’ve got these three main bad guys–LaChaise, Butters, and Martin–killing lots of people, taking all kinds of crazy exciting risks that make for great action. Then you have a crooked cop feeding them information and a kidnapped woman patching their wounds and helping out in a manner of speaking, but as a reluctant kidnapping victim. You’ve got his two main cohorts, Ansel Butters and Bill Martin backing LaChaise up for as long as they can stay alive. (Or four and a half, depending on how you look at it.) You’ve got Dick LaChaise with his sister and wife dead. The cast is complex in some respects because there are really four bad guys here. ![]() They’re smart, fearless, interesting to listen to, and they certainly have distinctive personalities. Not savage in their cruelty and sadistic impulses like some of Sandford’s more memorable psychos, but stone-cold killers with lots of guns and a serious hard-on for using them. The bad guys in this book are really bad. The book opens with a sting operation based on motives that may be suspect, and before long Dick LaChaise has escaped police custody and declared war on everyone involved in his loss. Sudden Prey wastes no time getting this promising premise underway. For her associates are even worse than she was, particularly her husband, a deeply violent man who swears an appropriate revenge: first he will find the names of those responsible then he will kill those nearest and dearest to them, just the way they did Candy.” In the ensuing shoot-out, she dies - and Davenport’s nightmare starts. For months, Lucas Davenport’s men have been tracking a vicious woman bank robber named Candy, and when they finally catch up with her, she does not go quietly. “It begins with a death and ends with one. From a craft standpoint–on the topic of characterization and character motivation particularly–I think there’s something valuable to be learned from what I humbly believe Sandford could have done better here. But I notice some different handling of characterization in this novel, and I was interested by its effect on my own engagement with the story. The plot is terrific and unfolds at a breakneck pace. There’s a bit of a departure from this in Sudden Prey, the eighth book in the Davenport series. Understanding what makes his bad guys tick and seeing their world through their eyes is part of the dark appeal these stories have for me. One reason I like his Lucas Davenport series so much is that these deftly plotted novels usually go deep into the minds of deranged killers in seriously engaging and convincing fashion. Anyone familiar with my taste in books probably knows how much I love John Sandford and admire his skills as a writer.
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