Sudden Prey

"Shoulda bought me them Big Macs."
Now, if it had been me, I would have definitely taken Richard "Dick" LaChaise to MacDonald's. Not necessarily for the company, though.

This is what I would boldly label as a Damned Good Book. Logical, wonderfully-paced suspense, memorable characters (Del Capslock is legendary, in my book) - a really neat, exemplary thriller. Sandford manipulates his variables with scientific precision; take the sentence length, for instance: short, explosive sentences to mark a character's panicked train of thought vs. floaty, descriptive, yet economical combinations that serve to suspend a significant moment in time, take the reader's breath away in a firm grip - the silence after a shot as snowflakes slowly, moodily show more fill the blank where sound and light had been.
As it often comes to pass with fishing, I came across the volume by sheer happenstance, and I can only hope it will happen again with more titles in the Davenport series (a rather likeable chap, Davenport).
Bonus information: my copy smells really nice. show less

Sudden Prey opens with a shootout outside of a bank between Lucas Davenport’s detective squad and the sister and wife of one Dick LaChaise. The police are cleared because the women had cold-bloodedly murdered a bystander before the attempted escape. The LaChaise family, however, are not turn-the-other-cheek people. With the help of two equally demented friends, Dick LaChaise sets about his revenge. They are crazy but not stupid and do not go down cleanly or easily. Once you accept the fact that the Minnesota Twin Cities has more serial killers than New York and L.A. combined, this is a very entertaining series.

In the 8th installment of the Prey series John Sandford has decided to kick things up a notch. Up till now Lucas Davenport has faced a cavalcade of psychopaths who have all had self-preservation at the top of their list. In this book however Davenport has to face off against criminals targeting cops for all out revenge and a do or die attitude.
So far the Prey series has really worked for me. The stories have all been connected enough that I can feel the thread between them but with plots and even a tone that is different from book to book. It’s not often a series manages to pull that off and Sandford has does it with flying colors. As usual this is not a “who done it” type of book, as we see the story from both the perspective of show more Davenport and the people he is after. Instead Sudden Prey falls into the crime/police detective sub-genre. Without a mystery for the reader to solve the plot really has to drive the story and in this case it succeeds. I particularly enjoyed the sub-plot with the dirty cop. He added another level that Davenport had to sift through and kept the plot just complicated enough to stay interesting.

What really made this a page turner was the pacing. Never a slow series, this installment really picks up the pace. It starts out with a straight up action beat that we normally don’t get from Sandford, who usually goes with more of the slow build. A big gunfight in chapter one is always a good place to start if you want a rip-roaring tale. While it dips for a few chapters after that as the villains and their supporting players are set up, this lull doesn’t last for long. The remaining two thirds of Sudden Prey seem to happen at full speed, never slowing down. Not usually a suspenseful writer, Sandford even managed to keep me on the edge of my seat several times.

For me this book fell somewhere between a mystery and an action thriller. That makes for a nice middle ground of two genres I like. If you are a fan of crime fiction and fast paced story telling then I would say this is a good book to check out. But if you haven’t read the earlier books in the series, start there first. Davenport has had an interesting journey up to this point and you don’t want to jump in half way.

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When Lucas Davenport's team takes out 2 bank robbers, the husband of Candy LaChaise, Dick LaChaise decides that vengeance is his. Accompanied by two radical friends, Butters and Martin, LaChaise goes to war with the Minneapolis police. Very exciting, well put together novel.

No one knows how to take apart a cop's family by death and grief like John Sandford. I melted when one by one they died. It was a hideous plot. Good job.

I've been on a Sandford binge.

I love his style and read every book when it comes out, but I realized with the titles being so generic, that the books blurred in my mind and I couldn't remember which was which. When I came across a pile of them in a second hand book stall, I bought 4 (and have now read them, one a day for 4 days!) I like it for lots of reasons but primarily I like the character of Lucas Davenport and the riffing he does with his fellow cops (the dialogue is excellent) The crimes are genuinely interesting and I also like the way Minneapolis is portrayed. I'm tired of books set in New York and LA, and this gives a flavor of an entirely different city.

Sudden Prey is the 7th prey book. It's one with Dick LaChaise, where he show more wants to kill cops who killed his sister and wife in a suspect robbery. In Davenport's inimitable manner, the shooting was clean (the women definitely shot first) but they had been following, one could almost say stalking the women.

What follows is horror as Dick and his 2 cronies try to kill the cop's families. Add in a corrupt cop and a hostage sister in law and things go haywire quickly.

This is a solid entry in the Prey series but not my favorite. I like my villains a bit more complex, and these guys were just mean and nasty from start to finish. But still def worth reading, it's a great series, this just isn't one of the best ones. show less

This book is apparently part of a series featuring Minneapolis police detective Lucas Davenport, of which it is installment number 8. This I did not realise when I started reading it (having bought it 8 years ago in 2008 for 50 hard earned cents); I can say the storyline and character development does not at all suffer from jumping in at number 8. Whilst I'm sure the additional background would paint a more vivid picture everything was still there for people like me who randomly start in the middle.

The story starts off with bank (credit union) robbery then the plot builds momentum with a follow up prison break and a seemingly unbalanced brother who decides to take revenge on the police who killed his sister & partner.

Was a hard one to show more put down, the writing left you always wanting to read just a bit more to see what happens and where things are going.

Would recommend. show less