Stephanie Bekker, the wife of Dr. Michael Bekker, is murdered. Her face is brutally beaten and her eyes are gone. Her lover sees the murderer, but decides not to come forward and only give the police little clues. Dr Bekker is the main suspect but has a tight alibi. Then comes the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth victim. Lieutenant Lucas Davenport -together with the Homicide from Minneapolis PD- must catch the murderer, while he himself dealing with the Internal Affair for beaten a (bad) boy in a bar.
The story reminded me of 'Strangers on a Train' but John Sandford made it more interesting. Two strangers, A & B, met in a theater bar. A wanted to kill his wife and asked B to do it while A established a tight alibi for himself. A later would kill the person who wanted to fire B from his job. To make the police more confused, A & B killed C, a complete stranger. Not everything went smoothly, though, for when B killed A's wife, D witnessed it. A & B planned to kill D, but they got the wrong person. Finally A killed B to get rid of any witnesses.
The best part was when the wife's lover found out that Lucas Davenport knew who he was. I like reading crime novels because of the reasoning, why a murderer murders people, how the police/detective can find the culprit, how the murderer sometimes escapes... The logic/reasoning how Lucas Davenport could guess who the lover was made sense (-->this is rare in fictional crime novels). It was so clever. This book ended with our hero left the police department so that the IA would leave him alone.
If there is one thing I find annoying in this book, it's the numbers of curse words. English is not my first language so I usually don't pay much attention about them and I just read and read. John Sandford's books are so full of them, that I begin to wonder, how can someone (his fictional character) live with so many curse words from his mouth and into his ear?
