Extreme Prey (Lucas Davenport Series #26)

by John Sandford

Overview

An extraordinary Lucas Davenport thriller from #1 New York Times–bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner John Sandford.
 
After the events in Gathering Prey, Lucas Davenport finds himself in a very unusual situation—no longer employed by the Minnesota BCA. His friend the governor is just cranking up a presidential campaign, though, and he invites Lucas to come along as part of his campaign staff. “Should be fun!” he says, and it kind of is—until they find they have a shadow: an armed man intent on killing the governor...and anyone who gets in the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780399573798
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/04/2017
Series:	Lucas Davenport Series
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	32,060
Product dimensions:	4.15(w) x 7.55(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

John Sandford is the pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist John Camp. He is the author of twenty-six Prey novels; four Kidd novels; eight Virgil Flowers novels; two YA novels coauthored with his wife, Michele Cook; and three other books, most recently Saturn Run.

Hometown:

St. Paul, Minnesota

Date of Birth:

February 23, 1944

Place of Birth:

Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Education:

State University of Iowa, Iowa City: B.A., American History; M.A., Journalism

Website:

http://www.johnsandford.org

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Extreme Prey"
by .
Copyright © 2017 John Sandford.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

Praise for Extreme Prey

“The latest Prey novel is exciting, politically astute, and ultimately terrifying. Sandford and Davenport are in top form.”—Booklist (starred review) 
 
“Add a hammock under a shady tree, and you've got a quintessential summer read.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
 
“Sandford, as always, sets a heart-pounding pace. He permeates his work with wit, an engaging hero readers have come to cherish and a cat-and-rat match that in this case draws on the streak of violence that for years has left a bloody stain on the nation. Timely and troubling, it’s a must-read for thriller devotees and political junkies.”—Richmond Times Dispatch

“This guy Sandford is good.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Praise for John Sandford

“It appears there is no limit to John Sandford’s ability to keep new breath and blood flowing into his Lucas Davenport series. This is a series you must be reading if you are not already.”— Bookreporter.com
 
“If you haven’t read Sandford yet, you have been missing one of the great summer-read novelists of all time.”—Stephen King
 
“Sandford has always been at the top of any list of great mystery writers. His writing and the appeal of his lead character are as fresh as ever.”—The Huffington Post
 
“Sandford is consistently brilliant.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer

From the Publisher

04/18/2016
A Hillary Clinton–like presidential candidate is slated for death in bestseller Sandford's average if topical 26th Lucas Davenport thriller (after 2015's Gathering Prey). Lucas has quit the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, but the state's governor, Elmer Henderson, needs his help. Henderson is running for president in the primaries against Michaela Bowden, who's seeking to be the first woman to hold that office. Henderson expects her to win and hopes that she will name him as her running mate. However, he fears that she may be assassinated after two people separately approach him and advise him to "be ready for the nomination" in case something were to happen to Michaela. With little more than a bad photograph of one of the two to go on, Lucas must identify the plotters before it's too late. Sandford reveals the plans of the would-be assassins, Marlys Purdy and her son, Cole, from the opening chapter, and the plot follows a familiar path toward the dramatic resolution that suggests a new direction for the long-running series. Readers who are looking for yet another assassination thriller that paints within the lines will be satisfied. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

2016-03-03
Forget the Iowa caucuses. The real way to effect political change in the nation's heartland, according to Lucas Davenport's latest antagonist, is a carefully calibrated assassination. Marlys Purdy has been through it all, and she's come to realize one thing for sure: the deck is stacked in favor of wealthy farmers, and Michaela Bowden's shoo-in presidential campaign isn't going to change that situation. The only hope for Marlys and her sons, straight-arrow Jesse and war-damaged Cole, is the election of Minnesota's left-wing governor, Elmer Henderson, and the best way to clear his path to the Democratic nomination is to remove Bowden with extreme prejudice. As the Purdys plot, Henderson reaches out to Lucas, who's left Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (Gathering Prey, 2015, etc.) because he's concerned about several winking directives he's gotten from people at campaign stops to move to the center so he'll be able to win the nomination if anything should happen to Bowden. It doesn't take Lucas long to trace the messages to the Progressive People's Party of Iowa, but once he makes the connection, he slows down. That's partly because so many PPPI members are superannuated flower children who can barely chew their food, partly because the remainder are such self-convinced revolutionaries that it's hard to winnow the wheat from the chaff. Aging activist Joseph Likely, for instance, clearly knows more than he's willing to say about the suspects Lucas is seeking, and PPPI secretary Grace Lawrence is still hiding secrets about the Lennett Valley Dairy bombing years ago. Can Lucas, working without a badge, sift through the harmless and the tangential radicals in time to protect Bowden from the coup de grâce he's certain is planned during her ill-advised visit to the Iowa State Fair? An efficient and unremarkable treatment of a story that keeps threatening to leap the gap from paranoid fantasies to tomorrow's headlines.

Kirkus Reviews