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One thing distinguishes John Sanford's long-running series featuring Lucas Davenport: it's nearly impossible to tell the titles apart, since almost all of them include the word "prey." But that's not the only distinguishing feature of the series. It's a reliably entertaining saga that doesn't take itself too seriously while it hums along, with (so far) twenty-seven entries.
In this episode, Davenport's adopted daughter Letty runs into a couple of travelers busking in San Francisco as she leaves Stanford for summer vacation. She buys them a meal and asks them about their life on the road. Skye is nervous about running into a man people call Pilot. She thinks he's a dangerous cult leader; her companion Henry would love to meet him, since he's reputed to have valuable connections in Hollywood. He doesn't believe all the rumors that Pilot and his followers kill people for fun. Henry finds out he's wrong the hard way, as Letty discovers when she gets a panicked call. Skye tells her Henry has disappeared in South Dakota and she's heard that Pilot has killed him. Since she knows Letty's father is a cop, she hopes he can help.
Letty explains the traveler life to her father, who has become weary of running a team of detectives for the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. His old nemesis, clinical depression, is lurking around the corner waiting to jump him. When Letty asks him to check into Henry's disappearance, he feels stirrings of the kind of excitement that might keep the darkness away, and soon he's tracking down the scattered bits of evidence that suggest Skye might have tipped him off to a serial killer who preys on people who aren't noticed when they disappear. He follows the trail to a music festival in Wisconsin, and bodies begin to pile up. Lucas's superiors are unhappy that he's left his jurisdiction to organize small rural law enforcement organizations, trying to put a stop to the mayhem as it spills over into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Sanford's narrative voice is so simple it verges on what Linton Weeks once derided as "the No-Style style," but what it lacks in literary graces it makes up for with easy-going fluidity and dialogue that is often sharp and funny. Though in reality serial killers are fairly rare in the upper Midwest, Sanford keeps the story grounded by inventing a band of killers who are dangerously prone to violence but not unusually intelligent or organized. The real focus of the story isn't on a struggle between good and evil but rather on the way ordinary men (and a few women) pull together to solve a problem.
Lucas is never so happy as when he's working with regular guys to lock up the bad 'uns. By the end of the novel we know that his battles with the bureaucrats may be over, but he's not entirely ready to hang up his guns. The good news for fans is that Sanford seems poised to scratch his head yet again to come up with another word to pair up with "prey."
§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, April 2015
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