Shadow Prey (Lucas Davenport Series #2) Book

Two aging radical Sioux named Sam and Aaron Crow have planned a murderous terror campaign in which they've sent their followers to several locations across the country to kill various government officials and other people they consider enemies of Native Americans. When throats start getting cut from Minnesota to New York, Lucas Davenport and the other Minneapolis cops find themselves in the middle of a national crisis.

While John Sandford greatly expanded the scale from the first book to the second, he doesn't skimp on adding new dimensions to his main character. Lucas is often frustrated in this one because he doesn't have good contacts in the Native American community of Minneapolis. Feeling useless pushes him in reckless directions and prompts him to try a fairly ugly and shady scheme to work people for information.

In addition to the work, Lucas is dealing with being a new father with his semi-regular girlfriend but he's also a chronic womanizer so a visiting NYPD detective named Lily Rothenberg catches his eye and the feeling is mutual. Fortunately, Sandford spices up the trope of having the hero hook up with someone in an action story by putting some weight and consequences to the relationship between Lily and Lucas. Davenport cares about his girlfriend but that doesn't stop him from seeing other women. Lily is in a supposedly happy marriage, but can't help feeling attracted to Lucas. Their relationship highlights their flaws and makes this whole romantic sub-plot a lot easier to take than the usual cliche of the main characters in a thriller falling for each other instantly and tumbling into bed.

Sandford displays another aspect he'd continue to give us throughout the series: memorable villains. The Crows actually seem like good and honorable guys in their own way, and the plan they've come up with is fiendishly clever with a definite goal in mind. There's another level of evil added with the man they consider their son, Shadow Love. Shadow is such a psycho that the Crows are hesitant to use him in a rampage that's designed to kill multiple people. When people think that a guy is too crazy to be used in a killing spree, that's when you know he's nuts.

Sandford also showed off his knack for creating tense scenarios that imagine large scale manhunts amidst media freakouts. This was written in 1990, but Sandford foreshadowed some elements that would become all too familiar. When one character refers to the killings as the first large scale and organized acts of terror on American soil, it's chilling. Even creepier is when one of the murders takes place in the Oklahoma City federal building which would become infamous just a few years later.

It's another action-packed and smart thriller which showed that Davenport would be doing more than just chasing serial killers in every book.

Next: Lucas beats up a pimp and tracks a couple of serial killers in Eyes of Prey.