Righteous Prey by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on October 4, 2022

Righteous Prey is a Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers crossover novel. Davenport novels are usually a bit darker than Flowers novels. Righteous Prey is essentially a buddy novel that balances humor and darkness. Davenport and Flowers banter their way through the plot as they try to stop five killers who are targeting assholes. The reader might have trouble deciding whether to cheer for the killers or for the cops.

Five billionaires who became wealthy through bitcoin investments are bored. They meet Vivian Zhao at a bitcoin convention. Zhao persuades them that the country is full of assholes who need killing and that people with money and time on their hands are well positioned to kill them. Zhao doesn’t have money of her own but she’s full of anger, largely because she doesn’t have money of her own. She’s taking out her anger on assholes by organizing a group that identifies itself as The Five. Each killing is accompanied by a press release taking credit for making the world a better place, one asshole at a time.

Readers who condemn John Sandford for being liberal (Amazon “reviews” suggest that those readers are plentiful) might be happy to learn that the killers are liberals. They are, at least, fed up with conservative and/or racist assholes. One victim is a criminal who preys on elderly Asians. One is a corrupt Texas politician who rails against migrants. One operates a hedge fund that acquires businesses and fires their employees. One might as well be Alex Jones.

Sandford likes to play with the professional rivalries between the FBI, the federal Marshals, and state or local cops. The “real cops” view the FBI’s “Special Agents” as useless, a perception that Sandford borrows from the real world. In this novel as in many of Sandford’s, all law enforcers not named Davenport or Flowers are just getting in the way.

The novel makes a strong indictment of bump stocks (as did the shooter in the Las Vegas massacre), not that the NRA or Republican state attorneys general care about mass shootings. To a lesser extent (primarily through a brief televised appearance by the wives of Davenport and Flowers), the novel spotlights ghost guns and suppressors, contributors to gun violence that don’t seem to be on any national politician’s radar.

The plot’s lighter side focuses on banter about Flowers’ fledgling career as a thriller novelist. He is finishing his second novel and just signed a contract for a third. I enjoyed the Inside Baseball view of publishing — just enough information to offer a glimpse of writing as a profession without bogging down the story. The best advice Flowers gets is from another cop: “Don’t make your hero into superman. . . . You know, they’re in thirty-two gunfights in three days against a hundred terrorists and get a flesh wound in the shoulder.” That’s a pet peeve I share, although it’s even worse in movies than in novels.

Fortunately, Sandford limits the shootouts but still manages to keep the story in motion. Action doesn’t always need to consist of gunplay and fistfights, although there is a realistic gunfight at the novel’s end. Sandford is never afraid to have Lucas and/or Flowers sustain more than a flesh wound, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t discuss the battle’s outcome. It suffices to say that this is a thriller with real thrills and that bullets fired rapidly with a bump stock have consequences.

There isn’t much to say about a Sandford novel. They’re always compulsively readable. This one is no exception. The Inside Baseball paragraphs about writing explain how to make a decent income writing thrillers. Not everyone can do it. Sandford deserves every penny he earns.

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The Investigator by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on April 12, 2022

John Sandford has never been a friend to readers on the far right. Some readers made that clear in Amazon “reviews” of Lucas Davenport novels in which Davenport prevented the assassination of a female Democrat who was running for the presidency and tackled threats from white supremacists. The “reviews” portrayed Sandford as a propogandist for the far left despite his love of guns, the value he places on law enforcement, and his apolitical approach to p4otagonists. Readers who value thrillers that paint everyone from the Middle East as evil incarnate while pretending domestic threats only come from “antifa” will probably want to stay away from Sandford, notwithstanding (or because of) the political centrism he brings to his novels.

The Investigator is the first novel to star Letty Davenport. Letty is Lucas’ adopted daughter. She has many of Lucas’ traits. She loves guns and isn’t bothered when she kills people, although she doesn’t kill them indiscriminately. She’s not much interested in most people who don’t work for law enforcement. She’s really not fond of violent extremists.

Letty is working in an internship for a senator who assigns her to work as a Senate investigator attached to Homeland Security because of her unique skills, including her willingness to conduct searches for which the police would need a warrant. She works with a former Delta, now a Homeland Security agent, to track down a threat posed by multiple militias in Texas. The militia leader, Jane Jael Hawkes, has a problem with migrants. Hawkes' own militia sometimes kills “illegals” rather than helping the Border Patrol take them into custody. Now she’s purchased stolen C4 and has teamed up with other militias to do something nefarious. It is clear to the reader that the nefarious act will have something about a caravan that is moving through Mexico on its way to a town in Texas that might offer refugee status to the travelers. Hawkes and her followers brand any political leader who would allow refugees into the country as "traitors."

The Investigator is chilling because the story’s foundation is convincing. You only need to dive into the comment sections of any mainstream news site/blog to understand how many people in this country prefer lies to facts, bigotry to tolerance, and guns to reason. They blame everyone but themselves for their circumstances. While their complaints about “elites” or “rich people” might be founded in the real world, they expand their grievances to include powerless individuals, including migrants, who cause them no harm. The powerless are easier to threaten or beat or kill than the powerful corporate leaders who ship jobs overseas while convincing workers that unions will somehow make their miserable jobs worse. People harboring irrational grievances who believe problems can be solved with guns are easily manipulated. The Investigator illustrates how easily manipulation might lead to tragedy.

Sandford’s fans know that Lucas Davenport novels can be dark while Virgil Flowers novels tend to be a bit lighter. The Investigator is on the darker side. Sandford’s dialog is always characterized by characters taking friendly shots at each other. Letty and her DHS partner do the same as they bond, but that dialog offers the only humor in a novel that takes the threat of domestic terrorism seriously.

Letty’s initial investigation give the novel the feel of detective fiction. The story gradually transitions to an action novel as Letty and her Homeland Security sidekick, without any of the superhuman antics of tough guy thriller heroes, take on the militias that have invaded a Texas town. The combination of investigation and action has served Sandford well. It is particularly effective in The Investigator. High-octane action and smart plot combine to make The Investigator one of my favorite Sandford novels. Sandford can probably make any character carry a series, but Letty clearly has what it takes to star in future novels.

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Masked Prey by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on April 14, 2020

Readers who believe that the Deep State exists and is a threat to their way of life will probably want to bypass Masked Prey. Amazon reviews of an earlier John Sandford novel proclaimed Sandford to be a left wing propogandist because Lucas Davenport, who is pretty far from left wing, prevented the assassination of a female Democrat who was running for president. Those readers will be apoplectic if they read Masked Prey, notwithstanding that Davenport’s motivations are never political. The reality is that Sandford is just as likely to skewer politicians from both parties as he is to mock the extremists who ramp up hatred over the Deep State.

A hidden website called 1919 has posted grainy photos of the children of politicians. One of those children, the daughter of a Democratic senator, is a teenager who blogs about being hot in D.C. Her boyfriend is trying to see whether other sites have picked up the pictures she posted when he stumbles on 1919. The website takes its name from a doubling of the 19th letter, or SS. Viewing the site as an invitation to make political statements by killing kids, the FBI becomes involved. And since the case has a political slant, Minnesota’s Democratic senator calls Davenport, a federal Marshal who is on the senator’s speed dial.

Davenport enlists the help of Bob and Rae, two Marshals who have become recurring characters in the series. Their light-hearted banter balances the darkness of the plot as Davenport pokes his nose into the various rightwing groups that might have created or taken an interest in the 1919 website. Some of those groups, of course, blame the left for planting a false flag. The truth about the site comes as a surprise.

The novel’s creepy entertainment value comes from Davenport's encounters with white supremacists, militia groups, and members of other fringe organizations, each with a different take on how government is a force for evil and why their own insular group holds the secret to human salvation. Sandford plays fair, making it clear that however whacky most of these folk might be, and however much they love their guns, most of them aren’t interested in carrying out acts of violence (if only because they fear arrest or being killed). They may be repulsive but killers tend to be lone wolves, not the sort who seek out validation in packs of like-minded screwballs. Sandford nevertheless recognizes the unfortunate reality that some people who hold beliefs far removed from objective reality are both deranged and dangerous.

Like all Sandford novels, Masked Prey moves quickly. Davenport makes a couple of morally questionable decisions, the kind of decisions that prove he is motivated by a desire to be effective rather than poltical or self-righteous beliefs. Davenport isn’t always admirable but he’s always interesting. That’s one of the reasons I keep coming back to the series. The larger reason is that Sandford is a born storyteller. He peppers the text with wit, clever observations, and sudden plot twists. If it were possible to go to the beach in the age of COVID-19, this would be the kind of fun, fast read that makes a good beach novel.

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Bloody Genius by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on October 1, 2019

Virgil Flowers novels tend to be a bit lighter than their companion Lucas Davenport novels, but neither series is crushingly heavy. Bloody Genius, like all of John Sanford’s novels, tells a fun story featuring likeable characters who trade barbs while laboring to solve a crime. Apart from following a successful formula, Bloody Genius offers one of the most engaging mysteries that Sanford has created. For that reason, I would rank it as one of the best of Sanford’s Virgil Flowers novels.

A professor sneaks a woman into a library at midnight, where he comes upon someone in his cubicle. The professor is clobbered on the head with his own laptop and the woman, who sees little and avoids being seen, decides that discretion is the better part of being a witness. For much of the novel, the police do not know who she is and are not even certain that anyone was in the library except the professor and his killer.

Since the professor has powerful friends with political connections, Virgil Flowers is dispatched to Minneapolis to assist the local homicide detectives, who have nothing. Flowers is careful not to step on the toes of the lead investigator, Margaret Trane. She overcomes her initial animosity toward Flowers, in part because Flowers is charming and funny and in part because he clearly isn’t trying to steal her thunder.

The reader knows more about the murder than the police, although the reader doesn’t know why the professor was killed or the identity of either the killer or the disappearing woman. Forearmed with that knowledge, the reader can enjoy Flowers’ investigatory missteps as he pursues theories that ultimately don’t fit how the murder occurred. The suicide (or murder) of another character and a mugging that might have been an attempted murder may or may not be related.

With all of those plot threads, the reader is never quite sure whether each new fact is a red herring or a clue. Did the murder have something to do with an academic dustup between the professor, who considered himself to be a real scientist, and members of the Cultural Affairs department, who the professor derided as useless? Did the cocaine in the professor’s desk tie into a motivation for murder? Why is a recorded conversation about a mysterious “experiment” hidden on a country-western CD in the professor’s sound system? Did the killing have anything to do with a malpractice lawsuit against the professor? Do seemingly unrelated crimes, including the theft of rare maps, furnish clues to the murder?

Sandford spins the plot elements with the skill of a master juggler. The eventual solution to the professor’s murder is clever. The crime is also one that an astute reader with esoteric knowledge that I lack might be able to solve. On top of a winning plot, Sandford ends the novel with a nice action scene and packs the story with his usual irreverent and profanity-laden dialog. I loved all of it, although readers who can’t abide the F-word (or the word pussy when it isn’t followed by the word cat), will want to steer clear of Bloody Genius. In my view, the naughty words just add to the fun.

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Neon Prey by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on April 23, 2019

Neon Prey is the kind of book that John Sandford can write on auto-pilot and still entertain. The novel is filled with chase scenes and shootouts and banter. The plot has no substance to speak of, unless you count chase scenes and shootouts as a substantive plot, but Sandford does action scenes so well that the reader needs nothing more. At this point, Prey novels are just an excuse to check in with familiar characters to see how their lives are going. Suffice it to say that their lives are exciting.

Sandford’s Prey novels are light with patches of darkness. Neon Prey (Neon because much of the action is in Vegas) might be darker than most, simply because a fair number of characters (innocent and guilty alike) die, and characters who don’t die take a bullet. Even darker is the cannibal. Yes, there’s a cannibal and yes, that's been done before, in both fiction and the real world.

Lucas Davenport and Marshal buddies Bob and Rae are joined by an FBI agent who resembles a young Davenport, much to Rae’s delight. The plot involves a killer named Deese who is arrested after beating a man who refused to pay his debt to a loan shark. Deese is charged with furthering a racketeering conspiracy and is released on bail. Getting bail on a federal violent crime isn’t easy, but the judge gets a piece of the action so everyone’s happy. Everyone except Deese’s victims, because Deese is the aforementioned cannibal.

Deese cuts off his monitoring device in Louisiana. Federal Marshals Rae Givens and Bob Matees are searching Deese’s property when they find a bunch of buried bodies. The number and condition of the bodies and the contents of Deese’s grill are, to say the least, disturbing. Bob and Rae ask Lucas to use his clout to get the Marshals assigned to find Deese because they know the FBI isn’t good at finding people. For that matter, they don’t think FBI agents are good at anything.

From there, the story involves tracking Deese, who hooks up with a home invader and a young woman who is along for the ride (and the drugs). Deese and his accomplices go on a crime spree, staying a step ahead of the Marshals and FBI for much of the novel, but keeping them busy with shootouts and rising body counts and some clever schemes to avoid being captured.

The Prey stories are darkly amusing because of Davenport’s nonchalant joking with Bob and Rae in the face of mayhem. After 29 Prey novels, readers know what to expect, and Neon Prey is exactly what a series fan expects to read. There’s nothing new or different here, but the action, dialog, and skillful storytelling are enough to sweep the reader along, as they always are in a Sandford novel.

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