Night Prey - John Sandford

In my opinion, Night Prey is better than the previous book in this Prey series. We knew the bad guy from the first page. His name was Koop, a cat burglar turned stalker turned serial murderer. The police, however, had no clue whatsoever. It seemed real to me. To find a murderer in a city of several millions people must be not easy, that is if the murderer not from out of town.

There were also some side cases for the Minnesota police, some were solved, some not. Lucas Davenport was back in the police department as a deputy chief. His girlfriend Weather had been moved to be with him and they lived together in his house.

A woman was found, dead with a ripped belly, dumped like a trash. A state investigator, Meagan Connell, came to ‘help’ the local police. She believed that the killer was a serial one. As she was sick and dying, she wanted to catch the culprit while she was still alive. The police had no clue, no eye-witness; and Lucas Davenport tried to follow any tiny possibility which usually turned out a dead-end and they had to start from square one.

Apart from Meagan Connell, Lucas Davenport also had Bob Greave in his team. Greave, initially loaned to ‘run errands’, was still green and in the PD perhaps only Davenport who agreed to be his mentor. The adventure in Winter Prey left Davenport with a scar in his neck and Night Prey gave him four broken ribs. While reading I kept in mind that this book was first published in May 1994 and not everybody had cell-phones at that time.