Field of Prey by John Sandford

John Sandford is one of the most prolific crime novel writers of his time, and while I think some of his books are formulaic, this one certainly is not – it’s Sandford at the top of his game. Field of Prey is the 24^th book in the Prey Series, written in 2014, and it’s a Lucas Davenport Novel. If you love this genre, you’ll find this story spellbinding, very hard to put down.

The novel begins with the attempted kidnapping of what would turn out to be the fifth of more than 20 young blonde women who were taken, raped, killed, and dismembered. The early murders were done by an efficient two-man team, R-A and Horn, and the women didn’t stand a chance, until number five, Heather Jorgenson. She had a Leatherman tool in her pocket and used it to cut her way to freedom and then repeatedly stab Horn as he drove away from the kidnap scene. R-A couldn’t see that happening since he was just getting in the chase vehicle. Heather got out and ran for help, and then Horn was never seen again. Some of the cops thought he was dead, some thought he had just escaped and gone into hiding.

But unbeknown to the police, the killings went on. R-A and Horn were so effective in choosing their victims that no one was aware that a serial murder was operating in their midst. No pattern to the disappearance of these women in rural Minnesota was apparent for years until a young couple, out in the country on a tryst, came across a powerful stench which came from, as the press called it, the Black Hole of Goodhue, a cistern where 23 skulls and other body parts were discovered in the most gruesome of scenes. That’s when Davenport was called in, a detective with Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. The massive database of crime facts that had to be assembled was turned over to one of Davenport’s colleagues, Bob Shaffer, who had more tolerance for such detail work while Davenport got to consider the bigger picture. And, it was Shaffer’s pursuit of the details that led to the first big break in this case which was dominating the national news during the months the case went unsolved. Unfortunately, the break came in the form of Shaffer’s death as he stumbled into R-A in the course of the investigation before he realized this was the killer. Then R-A developed a fixation for Catrin Mattsson, a Goodhue County investigator, a beautiful and formidable woman who kept appearing on the news as a spokesperson.

And so the story goes – great character development, believable and gripping plot. This one started out with intensity and it never let up. Sandford has a lot of books to choose from and I’ll immediately download another, this time one of the Virgil Flowers series.