Twisted Prey

Political Skullduggery

John Sandford is the pseudonym of Pulitzer Award winning journalist, John Camp. He writes the best-selling ‘Prey’ series featuring law-keepers Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers. Some books have them both, some have one or the other, with the missing one making a brief ‘guest’ appearance.

In the latest, Twisted Prey, it’s Davenport at the centre, having moved from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to the elite U.S. Marshals Service; he has friends in high places and when one of them is threatened, he pulls out all stops.

The thriller begins with the car of Minnesota Senator Porter Smalls being pushed off the road down a cliff. He survives but his companion and fundraiser, Cecily Whitehead, is killed. The strange thing is that accident investigators find no mark on the car that indicate it was deliberately rammed, with the intention of murdering Smalls.

The Senator knows he was neither drunk not hallucinating, and summons his friend Davenport to find out what really happened. Smalls is sure that his rival politician Taryn Grant was behind this assassination attempt, but he needs to prove it. Grant had, in an earlier book, tried to discredit Smalls before by planting inappropriate content on his computer and Davenport had come forward to prove his innocence. Grant is not the kind to forget an enemy and Davenport is a formidable adversary.

Taryn Grant is rich and ruthless with the White House in her sights. Lucas arrives with his loyal fellow marshals Rae Givens and Bob Matees and quickly makes a dent in the investigation. Grant gets her hitman John Parrish to attack Davenport, but he escapes being badly hurt, or worse, killed.

Then, suddenly, Davnenport’s wife, Weather, is badly injured in a hit-and-run accident and lands in hospital. He has to rush by her side, and finds that the driver of the car that crashed into her committed suicide. It is quite by chance he discovers that it was another murder attempt to get him off the case. Now Davenport is angry and even more determined to find the culprits.

The thriller takes in political ambition, big-time corruption, shady arms dealers with a villain who is pure evil and devilishly cunning. Several heart-stopping episodes lead to the chilling climax. Twisted Prey is the twenty-eighth book in the series, that shows no signs of running out of steam. And yes, Virgil Flowers has a ‘walk-on’ scene.

Twisted Prey

By John Sandford

Publisher: Putnam

Pages: 400