The book proceeds with alternate scenes from each side – maddog planning his next atrocity, monitoring the news reports of his last and taunting the police with copies of his ‘rules’ which he leaves on his victims, and Davenport managing the media, fending off political interference and devising innovative strategies to find maddog before he strikes again. The portrait is absolutely convincing and makes his attacks both horrible and at the same time entirely compelling. In this particular case, the culprit is a lawyer who calls himself maddog, a man with no friends whose ego creates for him a powerful persona bolstered by his attacks on women of a certain physical type.

On the other side, we come to know a great deal about a criminal, normally an intelligent but warped person, who needs to be stopped. The variety of his friends and interests appeal there is barely a pause in the action, and the conversation is sharp with plenty of repartee. On Davenport’s side we see him interacting with the politicians who oversee the police department, his fellow officers, and his personal friends: his latest squeeze, childhood friend Sister Mary, and so on. From the beginning the narrative is split between Davenport and his latest foe. Rules of Prey was the first of a series which follow a common pattern. Sandford puts this down to publishers requiring both characters and plots perfected before issue whether all authors get such sage advice I doubt but it seems to have worked for him. What I find interesting is that for the Minneapolis-based Davenport, as for many other fictional detectives, the character emerges fully-formed from the first outing. At the same times he freely confesses that Davenport was a construct designed to appeal, and that few real cops have (for example) Davenport’s interest in fashion.

In an introduction John Sandford explains how he came to write it, and refers to his long experience as a journalist which no doubt helped to keep it real. This is a re-release of the first Lucas Davenport thriller originally published in 1989, the first of a series of about 30, and counting.

Rules of prey series