A presidential candidate gets some threatening messages, and believes that there is real danger there. As a favour (I think), they call on Lucas - who handed in his notice to the BCA in the previous book - to do some digging, in order to find out whether any criminal activity might actually be going on.

And the set up for the story is pretty good: Lucas finds himself investigating a group of anarchic/leftie radicals who we know (and he shortly finds out) do have ambitions for serious mischief.

Lucas gets bootstrapped into the investigation after talking with Kidd, who does a bit of computer wizardry to narrow down the source of the messages. Like in Silken Prey, I thought this was a little bit of a cop-out, but unlike that book, this is as far as the Kidd involvement goes, so it doesn't really spoil things.

Nearly everyone Lucas ends up talking to is either lying to him (because they're in on, or know people who are in on, the plot) or they're unwilling on principle to talk to the police. And many of them don't really trust others in the group, they start to form their own conclusions about what's happening, which leads to a pretty confused trail for Lucas to follow. We know what's happening, but from Lucas' point of view things seem a bit random and inconsistent.

I very much enjoyed it this one - it was pretty tense and there was quite a lot of story. Quite a bit better than Gathering Prey.

It didn’t seem to make a lot of difference that Lucas wasn’t an official law enforcement officer in this one - but it’s hard to see that he could keep on having adventures like this just by doing favours to security details that need help. At the end of this book he gets offered the chance to be a US Marshall which I think will be a more comfortable situation. So I'm straight on to reading Golden Prey which is the next in the series.

Completed : 22-Jan-2019 (audiobook, read by Richard Ferrone)