Chosen Prey - John Sandford

In Chosen Prey, we meet James Qatar, an art history professor who loved to play with Photoshop. He took a pornographic photograph from internet, replaced the head with a woman’s he knew, converted it into a drawing, and sent it to the woman by mail anonymously to annoy her. Years went by and the police found a body of Julie Aronson, who had been missing for 1 ½ years, in a hillside south of Hastings. When they did a thorough search in that area, more bodies were found.

Apart from the usual companions, Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport got a help from Terry Marshall, a smart deputy sheriff from Menomonie - Wisconsin, whose niece had been missing nine years ago, apparently also one of the Aronson’s killer’s victims. Lucas knew from the start that Terry Marshall should not be working the case, but it was Marshall who brought new facts to his attention, that Aronson’s killer had been doing it for years. Marshall’s niece mentioned to her friend that her boyfriend – the killer - looked like Edward Fox in Day of the Jackal. As we can see in pic below, he looked like most white men, I mean, nothing very special about the face. He could easily blend with the crowd. I have seen numerous films with Edward Fox and he usually was in small parts or not-small-parts and I usually don't think about him after the movie ended. I even believe that if Marshall's niece mentioned this character, it was because she recently saw the movie and liked it very much. So ordinary it was, that when the picture of the killer - who was supposed to be like Edward Fox - was passing around, no one recognized him - not even his own mother.

Edward Fox in Day of The Jackal (1973)

I think the conclusion was a bit flat. My favourite is The Eyes of Prey’s: Lucas Davenport hit Michael Bekker’s beautiful face with a gun, in rage. In this book, he only watched the killer being executed. Although usually the bad guys in Prey series ended up dead, it was still disappointing to read how our hero raced to the place of execution only to be a watcher. He did become a bit soft because of Weather’s influence.

Lucas Davenport was together with Weather again, planning to have a kid or two. There was also a political problem and perhaps Lucas and his boss would lose their jobs in the police department. The governor liked the way they handled the case, though.

The new Porsche was a C4 and it was supposed to look like this: