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Title: Phantom Prey (Lucas Davenport Mysteries)
ISBN: 0399155007
Author:
John Sandford
Publicate Date: 2008-05-06
Publish: 2008-05-06
List Price: $26.95
Average Customer Rating: 3.5
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $4.89
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $3.00
Amazon Merchant Price: $16.82
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Lucas Davenport at his best!
An excellent John Sandford "Who Dun It", in typical fashion he keeps you guessing to the very end. Sandford humanizes Lucas Davenport to the point you can see him as your next door neighbor. You can almost see him walking up to your front door.
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2: A good read but I've read better in the Prey-series
This latest John Sandford Prey mystery is a fine enough read. Speaking in stars, where 5 is the most, this is a small 3 star read. I have read previous Prey mysteries which were way better, but this is not to say that Phantom Prey is bad. Not at all. But seems to me like Sandford is getting just a little tired of writing about Lucas Davenport and the BCA and the Minneapolis police. I don't know.
A wealthy, young Goth-girl has disappeared, leaving only a splatter of blood behind her in her mother's house. There is no body and no sign of forced entry and her mother, the very wealthy health-club owner and widow Alyssa Austin seeks out the help of Lucas Davenport after the regular police has given up finding her daughter (the daughter's body, should she be dead). Lucas is not crazy about taking on this case, but his wife Weather, who is friends with Alyssa Austin, has manages to convince him to give the case a look. Lucas discovers that the young girl was hanging out with a Goth-crowd and when the members of this crowd begin mentioning a mysterious fairy-girl who keeps disappearing, he gets seriously interested in the case, and pretty soon he is in serious danger himself. When more dead Goths begin turning up, Lucas has to speed up his investigations and look into clues that keeps pointing him in different directions.
The reader is told who the killer is halfway through the book and that did bother me a bit. Usually I do not mind being told this, some books tell you who the killer is from page one and still it can be a great mystery. But in this case I don't think it really was an advantage to know that much. All in all I can recommend this one as a light and entertaining read, but if you haven't read any of the Prey-series yet, begin with the first ones. They are better. This one can easily stand alone though.
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3: Masterful jewel
Sandford has his hero, Lucas Davenport, currently of the MN Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, musing early that life is just chaotic, happenings that save, or take, lives. Weather, his wife and a medical doctor, believes in cause-and-effect. After a bloodily murderous story, Davenport convincingly restates his position, but in fact Sandford, the author, belies it by crafting a scintillating book that blinds one to the incredibly finely ordered plot lines.
This is a jewel of a book. It contains so artfully crafted a plot and set of characters you only see all the facets after the last chapter, looking back in awe at the smooth and so deceptive flow of words. There are Goths, domestics, big and little drug dealers, snitches, farmers, little old ladies, b---hy ladies, stage and sex actors, ghosts, webmasters, sheriffs, cops, SWAT, athletes...all converging to a bang-up conclusion. At least three, or four, or maybe six different cases are actually going on, of which we see only flashes for many chapters, look-ins on little scenes--until the lights start going on in your head as the intersecting, overlapping crimes and odd happenings begin to sort themselves out. This has got to be the way police really work, numerous cases in varied states of development involving shifting sets of officers. Lucas is in the dark more than the reader, after Sandford reveals the seemingly central killers while yet only half way into his story. So we know, but Davenport doesn't--little good though it does us in recognizing all the other facets of fire and danger that await.
I don't know how Sandford can produce this now-long series, but he just never flags, constantly inventing (discovering?) new ways of criminality and fractured personalities. I enjoyed reading this one so much more than the pathological last one; here the perps are solely sociopaths. It was also fun to see him keep so many threads going inside one novel.
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4: Don't start with this book
If you are just starting to read the Davenport series please don't start with this book or you will probably be turned away. This is not his best work by far, but still fun if you are already a fan. If this would have been my first Sandford novel I don't think I would have read any more, that being said this is about my 18th, so I do enjoy his work. Just do yourself a favor and don't let this be your first foray into the Davenport series.
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5: Phantom Prey
Not up to John Sandford's usual excellent writing. This is the only one of the Lucas Davenport books that I could have skipped. Very disappointing.
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