Golden Prey

February 27, 2017
Near the start of Thriller Award–winner Sandford’s solid 27th Lucas Davenport novel (after 2016’s Extreme Prey), holdup man Garvin Poole and his gang hit a dope counting-house in Biloxi, Miss. During the robbery, Poole fatally shoots four drug dealers and one of their granddaughters, a six-year-old girl. Davenport, a former Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension official who’s now a U.S. marshal with the freedom to take on any case he wants anywhere in the country, decides to go after Poole. Davenport assembles all available information on Poole, his family, his associates, and his girlfriend. Meanwhile, Luis Soto, “a bad man liked being a bad man,” and torture specialist Charlene Kort are working on behalf of the robbed drug boss; Davenport gets a sample of Soto and Kort’s handiwork when he finds Poole’s parents brutally slain at their home in La Vergne, Tenn. Sandford’s trademark blend of rough humor and deadly action keeps the pages turning until the smile-inducing wrap-up, which reveals the fates of a number of his quirky, memorable characters. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

March 15, 2017
Garvin Poole is a shooter and a thief. Sturgill Darling is a spotter. He tracks big-dollar opportunities that a guy like Garvin can exploit, and he's spotted a score in Biloxi, Mississippi. A South American drug cartel is moving bales of cash out of a Biloxi shipyard that was ruined by Hurricane Katrina, but the cartel's soldiers have grown careless. When Gar and Sturgill strike, five lie dead along with one child. The take is millions. Lucas Davenport has used his political connections to secure a job with the U.S. Marshals. With a blank check, he can do what he does best: huntin this case, for Gar and Sturgill. But he has competition: two cartel thugs, Luis Soto and Charlene Kort. Luis is a stone-cold killer, but Charlene is something else: she likes working with power tools to get relatives to talk. When someone's sawing off your leg with a Black and Decker, one tends to say whatever is needed to make it stop. The twenty-ninth Prey novel is a very good, straightforward chase thriller, laced with gallows humor throughout.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2016

Lucas Davenport has a new assignment: he's a U.S. marshal with leeway to investigate any case he wants to nationwide. Here he's sure he recognizes the handiwork of a criminal who was once the leader of a gang infamous for taking large stacks of cash and leaving behind bodies.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.