Review: Same plot, different 'Prey' from Sandford

In this story: A well-established formula Careening all over the place RELATED SITES

"Chosen Prey"
By John Sandford
Putnam
Fiction
360 pages

By Adam Dunn
Special to CNN

(CNN) -- If there were a poster child in detective fiction for a man who gets to have his cake and eat it too, it would be Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport, protagonist of John Sandford's wildly successful "Prey" series.

In the course of several bestsellers, this character -- a sort of roguish Midwestern knight errant with a .45 -- has managed to work his way up the ladder to a cozy political position in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It's a job which allows him to use the resources of the Minneapolis Police Department while operating just outside its legal boundaries -- since, after all, he previously used excessive force on a suspect in custody and was kicked off the force.

Davenport is an idealized, bigger-than-life crime stopper. He has his own personal network of informants throughout the Twin Cities, trading favors for tips as he courts the media and hunts down the region's most violent offenders. He has cashed in on the economic free-for-all of the 1990s, turning a fantasy gaming hobby into a multimillion-dollar corporate IPO. He periodically gets to beat bad guys to a pulp (or kill them) while miraculously escaping the usual recriminations. His police car is a Porsche. His suits are Italian. And oh, yes, he regularly manages to score with an average of two women per novel -- while escaping marriage or lasting commitment.

A well-established formula

Sandford's twelfth "Prey" novel deviates little from his now established formula. There's a sociopathic killer, usually -- but not exclusively -- a man preying on women, who makes his MO known to Minneapolis authorities. In the case of "Chosen Prey," it's an art history professor, James Qatar, who takes secret photographs of women and turns them into pornographic drawings. The chief of police, a bedraggled postfeminist icon named Rose Marie Roux, assigns Davenport to work the case, fearing public crucifixion of the department by an ever-influential media corps.

Davenport's pull with the press is as magnetic as ever. Television reporter Jennifer Carey, mother of his illegitimate daughter, makes a cameo in the book with the line, "Why don't we get your handcuffs and find an empty van?" Hubba, hubba. Meanwhile, Davenport plants stories to flush the killer out from above while working his contacts from below.

As usual, Davenport is backed by a stalwart and long-suffering crew of Minneapolis cops, including disheveled undercover officer Del Capslock and former lover Marcy Sherrill. As has become standard procedure, Davenport's team is joined by an outsider, this one a state officer with the apt name of Marshall, a bespectacled country cop whose John Lennon glasses do nothing to tame his elemental presence.

"Marshall didn't look anything like Lennon; he looked like something that would have eaten Lennon," Sandford writes. Well, OK.

Marshall enters the scene because a body with the killer's MO washed up on his rural beat, with the added bonus that it was Marshall's niece.

Careening all over the place

The hunt, which Sandford obviously enjoys plotting, sends the good guys careening all over Minnesota, chasing red herrings in the sex industry and art classes. The author's tactic of plunging Davenport into a foreign industry (in his previous novel, "Easy Prey," it was the fashion world), makes for a convenient contrivance: the crossover of the protagonist from his other series, an artist named Kidd, who is introduced with the same college-jock background as Davenport, and who proceeds to bed Marcy Sherrill in less a hundred pages.

Kidd is ostensibly called in to help the beleaguered cops understand the killer's artistic inclinations. He also seems to be there to borrow some bestseller karma off of Davenport, since his own series has not been as successful.

The subplot to Davenport's relentless pursuit of the killer is his home life. Now he's back with sexy Valkyrie surgeon Weather Karkinnen (who has by now been shot at, firebombed and run off of roads by Davenport's various quarries), ruminating over his latest case while trying to impregnate her during sleepovers. While it would appear that they're back on track to marriage, at least two other potential candidates for Davenport's manly ministrations float around "Chosen Prey."

So Davenport is back for his annual battle against insanity, commandeering the Midwest to track his prey while living an idealized two-car-garage existence without pressure of commitment. As such, he is a fantasy figure for both male and female readers, a meat-and-potatoes Good Guy for the heartland to look up to -- and, judging by Sandford's sales figures and tour stops, it still does after 12 books. The author has managed to find a happy, healthy-selling middle ground whereby his series ages (but not really), becomes more complex (while staying the same), and nurtures its audience (on the little-changing product it so obviously loves).

So, besides having his cake and eating it too, Davenport embodies another adage: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

John Sandford

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