Silent Prey (Lucas Davenport Series #4) Book

A bored Lucas Davenport is a dangerous Lucas Davenport, and now that he's no longer a cop, Lucas is very bored. While his gaming and police simulation software company is making him oodles of money, Lucas misses the action of his old job and is trying to spice things up by picking bar fights and seeing if he can break the sound barrier in his Porsche.

Relief from the tedium comes when a serial killing psycho that Lucas had caught escapes from jail during his trial and heads to New York where he embarks on a splashy murder spree. Davenport's old flame, NYPD detective Lily Rothenburg, recruits Lucas to consult with them on the manhunt, but that's only part of the reason that she wants him to come to Manhattan. Lily has been investigating the possibility that a group of NYPD officers have been killing career criminals, and another cop was murdered when he started closing in on identifying some of them. Under the guise of hunting the serial killer, Lily wants to put Lucas with some of the cops suspected of being part of the group to see what he can shake loose. Davenport may have been craving some excitement but hunting a madman and a group of rogue cops may be a little more than he was hoping for.

So this one has two parallel stories, and Sandford used a fairly big coincidence to get them to intersect. Davenport trying to sniff out a group of vigilantes hiding in the NYPD is the more interesting of the two. There's a lot of stuff about using these new fangled computers to identify patterns that should seem dated as hell, but Sandford has always had a knack for incorporating technology of the day without dwelling on it so that it doesn't drag down the core story.

There's also a point made that killing off some of New York's worst repeat criminals to make a difference seems terrifyingly practical on some level. When one of the bad guy explains himself late in the book, he notes that by killing off a relative handful of scumbags, they can eliminate thousands of crimes that impact innocent people. Seeing Lucas, who has his own habit of sometimes taking the law into his own hands, dealing with the fall-out of this was particularly interesting.

Unfortunately it's the serial killer stuff that takes up a larger part of the book. This villain is not one of my favorite bad guys in the Prey series, and spending so much time in his head isn't a lot of fun. Sandford tried to make him completely insane and yet rational enough to evade a full-scale manhunt for him, and the two tones just don't mix well. Plus, the better Davenport villains usually have some kind of self-interested motive rather than just being crazy town banana pants so I find a guy killing for the sake of killing lacking when compared to some of the other baddies in the series.

I'd recommend reading Eyes of Prey before this since it functions as a direct sequel to that one.

Next: Lucas has to bundle up in Winter Prey.