I find John Sandford novels a reasonably quick read, and I quite like the Virgil Flowers novels. I find him an interesting protagonist, and I like his investigative style. The Lucas Davenport novels I don't tend to pick up as often.
Night Prey is one of Mr. Sandford's novels featuring Lucas Davenport. Most of (and I think perhaps all of) the novels featuring Davenport have the word "Prey" in the title, and apart from that (in my experience) little to indicate what the novel is about. The backs of the editions I get are taken up mostly with Mr. Sandford's picture, so the description is usually a little sparse, and the cover consists almost exclusively of the author's name and "whatever Prey". As a result, I treat the acquisition of a "Prey" novel a bit like a game of chance, and I never know before I'm a couple of chapters in whether it's one I've read before or not. So that's the reason I don't tend to pick up the Davenport novels as frequently, though I also enjoy them.
Night Prey, as it happens, I have not previously read. Night Prey appears to be set while Davenport is still with the Minneapolis police, before he joined the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (which is where Virgil Flowers works). But, based on my read, I suspect Lucas will soon be moving to the state agency, and in Night Prey works with an investigator from the BCA who is on the track of a serial killer.
The serial killer is quite well drawn, not a criminal mastermind, but a deconstructing mess who doesn't quite realize he's not the invincible mastermind he is in his own head. The ending I thought was a bit of a cop out on the question Mr. Sandford posed in his author's note about how (or if) you prevent a killing by prosecuting a less serious charge, but the tension was built up nicely and resolved to my satisfaction.
The fascinating part about Night Prey to me, and the part that was subtly, but I think very well done, was the transformation of Lucas Davenport. In the early novels, Davenport is most frequently described with a seven letter expletive. He's macho, almost superpowered, independently wealthy, a clothes horse and a guy who attracts women like flies to honey for reasons that are not particularly obvious when reading his dialogue (a one-line pick-up involving an expletive about brains being too tight sticks in my recollection for some reason). The women are somewhat typical of the old private investigator novels, appear for one novel (or more often with Davenport, a couple of chapters) then disappear.
It's not uncommon in detective novels to have a lone detective, in the nature of a chivalrous knight (or perhaps not so chivalrous) wed to his mission and unable to place commitment to a person or family above the mission. Frequently, these detectives have the one-book stands with the woman in peril or the femme fatale, then move on to the next.
In the later Prey novels, Davenport is either wed to or living with Dr. Weather Karkinen, a dark, Finnish, slightly built hand surgeon. Davenport is no longer a womanizer, but a one-woman man, whose cases often seem to involve Weather or their daughter being in danger. I've been less interested in those novels, partly because I don't like personal danger/vendettas driving the mystery, and partly because I have had a hard time understanding (and thereby accepting as valid in book) the relationship between Lucas and Weather.
It's also not uncommon in detective novels to have the detective with a family, whose family seems to be placed in danger due to the rigors of the job.
But how does an author transition the lone wolf detective to the family man detective? I think Night Prey shows that transformation. I missed (I think, or don't recall) the novel in which Weather saves Lucas' life, and presumably there's an attraction that develops from that feeling of being in the trenches together. But for me that's not enough to fully justify the type of relationship they seem to have later, with a family and a deep devotion. Mr. Sandford does about as good a job as it's possible to do with that I think. He shows some of what Weather sees in Lucas, some of what he sees in her, and why Lucas places such value on Weather's skills as a surgeon. I've always felt about the later novels that it doesn't really ring true that this cop who deals with life and death in each novel should place such a high value on cosmetic surgery to hands. But Night Prey has Lucas observe Weather performing surgery, and I think we can see why and how he internalizes the importance of Weather's profession.
It's also subtle, but as Lucas meets with (and still flirts with) other women in Night Prey, he thinks of them in terms that remind him of, or are similar to, the terms in which he thinks of Weather. So it seems quite natural that he's falling in love with Weather in a way that will lead to his committed relationship, when he starts to see in other women images of beauty that remind him of Weather. He also (in this book as in later books) doesn't seem to spend much waking time with her, given their respective lifestyles (she's early to bed, early to rise; he's the reverse and they're both workaholics) but begins to feel that with her, he's home, where before he was just wherever he parked his stuff.
I really like it because it's not overdone, it fits very nicely with the one-book, one-killer approach to the series, but explains the character of Davenport and the overarching story arc in a way that I haven't previously appreciated in the Davenport novels. It's enough to make me want to read more of (or perhaps re-read) the post-Weather Prey books... if only I can create some sort of system to track which of them I've read so I don't keep picking up the same ones again and again.
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