Rules of Prey (1989)

I mostly enjoyed this police procedural thriller by John Sandford, another mass market paperback I had lying around, but I'm not about to start on the whole freaking series. They have been coming literally every year since this and I'm not even kidding: Shadow Prey, Eyes of Prey, Silent Prey, Winter Prey, Night Prey, Mind Prey, all the way to #31 in 2021, Ocean Prey, with #32 Righteous Prey scheduled for later this year. When you're on brand, stick with it. Ride this horse home. And why not? Sandford is good. It's standard thriller fare, with a rogue police investigator, a brilliantly methodical serial killer, and beautiful women of various body types. But Sandford—already a Pulitzer-winning journalist in the '80s as John Camp—is aces at putting one of these together. It'll keep you up all night, on the edge of your seat, page-turner, etc. I picked it up originally mostly for the scenery—it's set in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. The scenery is not bad, reminded me of home, but there could have been more. It made me think of reading J.A. Jance's hardboiled detective novels for the Seattle scenery. The scenery in Jance is better, but Sandford is better at writing a thriller. Rules of Prey is more focused on the case at hand, which is all neatly put together. The sexism along the way is as rote as it is ripe. You might like to think this kind of stuff didn't sell in 1989 but you would be wrong evidently. Our rogue investigator and star of the series Lucas Davenport is an inveterate wick dipper among his many other familiar manly attributes. The gals all eat it up in this hothouse fantasy. OK, is what it is, etc. I have more problem with the "copaganda" side, which dogs all police procedurals up to and including The Wire and beyond. Yes, a serial killer as heinous as this one—"maddog" by name, lowercase, which I like not least because it is "goddam" spelled backwards—does not particularly "deserve to live." Maybe yes, maybe no, but no matter how we feel about that, a cop has no right to decide the issue, as Davenport does here (oops, was that really a spoiler?), with many readers no doubt cheering along, including me to some degree. I mean, this is a real bad guy. But it's still playing for the cheap seats, no matter how skillfully the rest is put together, and that makes it copaganda and so does the incidental rapiness. If you can overlook those aspects, I can see where Sandford and the Prey series could become addictive.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.