John Sandford is one of the great entertainers of crime fiction, known for his fast-paced, adrenaline-producing suspense novels, and Twisted Prey is par for the course: canny plotting, tight prose, swift tempo; tick, tick, tick. It’s not a standout in the long-running Prey series, but with plenty of page-turning propulsion, it’s bound to please Sandford’s acolytes and makes for perfect beach reading, with pages that almost turn themselves.

A few books back, Lucas Davenport moved on from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to the U.S. Marshals Service. His nose for trouble — finding it, and finding himself in it — hasn’t abated. Twisted Prey opens with Minnesota Senator Porter Smalls involved in a high-speed crash he insists was an assassination attempt engineered by his (and Davenport’s) old nemesis, Minnesota Senator Taryn Grant. The local accident investigators determine the crash to be accidental, so Smalls calls in Davenport and fellow marshals Rae Givens and Bob Matees.

Twisted Prey zips along at a great clip, but becomes a little too perfunctory, as each lead Davenport uncovers is inevitably gunned down, and the he’s forced back to square one, only for the same thing to happen again. It’s your standard game of cat-and-mouse that seems destined for a stunning climax, but ends with — well, not a whimper, exactly, but not wholly satisfactorily. That said, I’ll be back for Neon Prey later this year; twenty-nine books into this series, Sandford has earned my trust, and though this one didn’t quite stick the landing, nobody writes a slicker page-turner.

ISBN: 9781471174841
Format: Paperback / softback
Pages: 400
Imprint: Simon & Schuster Ltd
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd
Publish Date: 1-May-2018
Country of Publication: United Kingdom