Twisted Prey by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on April 24, 2018

Twisted Prey would earn my recommendation just for this sentence: “Survivalists fantasize about SHTF day, when Shit Hits The Fan — Mexico invades Arizona, the gasoline runs out, all the chickens get eaten, and anybody who doesn’t have a root cellar in the backyard fully stocked with AR-15s, camouflage hats, hunting bows, and gold coins is doomed to a life of sexual slavery or death by cannibalism.” Like, totally. Fortunately, I don’t have to rely on a single sentence to recommend the latest Lucas Davenport novel, because the rest of the book is nearly as entertaining.

A senator’s SUV is sideswiped on a gravel mountain road, forcing the SUV over the edge and into a tree. The crash kills Senator Smalls’ lover. Smalls is sure that the accident was deliberate, but accident investigators tell him that there is no sign of a second vehicle’s involvement. The senator is from Minnesota, so he naturally calls Lucas Davenport for a second opinion.

Lucas is a U.S. Marshal these days, but his boss regularly lends him to politicians who need a criminal investigator because keeping politicians happy is good for the Marshal Service’s budget. Smalls believes Minnesota’s other senator, Taryn Grant, was behind the assassination attempt. He needs Lucas to prove that a crime was committed and to find out who committed it. Lucas obligingly heads to Washington and appropriately checks into the Watergate Hotel.

Lucas’ investigation leads him to a business that deals with military procurement contracts and to a number of shady characters connected directly or indirectly to that business and less provably to Grant. When a target of the investigation is murdered, Lucas has to deal with the victim’s brother (a lieutenant colonel) and lover (a CIA assassin), both of whom have been led to believe that the target was killed by Lucas.

As that story gets rolling, Lucas is distracted when his wife Weather gets into a car accident — or was it? His Marshal friends Bob and Rae join the investigation as Lucas tries to get to the bottom of the assassination attempt and a series of killings that are apparently related. He even finds himself working with the FBI, which gives John Sandford a chance to make fun of humorless, career-minded FBI agents. While the FBI is an natural target for Sandford’s humor, he also pokes fun at DHS, whose agents, for the sake of job security, pretend every crime they investigate is an act of terrorism.

Sandford often works a political environment into his stories, but he’s evenhanded about making both Republicans and Democrats the bad guys. (In this novel, a Democrat is the villain.) None of it is mean-spirited, but Sandford does have a clear-eyed view of the nation’s political environment. At one point, Lucas laments the impossibility of reading anything on the internet (including comments left on a website that gives home construction tips) that doesn’t quickly descend into caustic name calling by people on both the right and the left. “I mean, why?” he asks. “Is there a difference between a right-wing and a left-wing two-by-four?” That’s another sentence that makes the novel worth reading.

Politics aside, Lucas is more humane than most thriller characters. He’s a tough guy, but unlike most protagonists in tough guy novels, he doesn’t feel the need to let the world know how tough he is or how much he loves his guns. He’s secure, he’s self-deprecating, and he thinks of villains as people; he has no use for ideologues who dispense death casually.

The plot holds together plausibly, a rarity in modern thrillers. The ending might be predictable but it’s satisfying. In fact, the entire novel is satisfying as another example of Sandford’s reliable ability to tell a fast-moving story about down-to-Earth characters who are competent without being full of themselves.

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