Another in the Lucas Davenport series, later than Certain Prey and with more of a focus on Davenport than that book had. This tells the story of a set of families of Soviet descent, who have operated some sort of spy-ring in the past and - for reasons which I don't think are entirely made clear - kill a Russian who has political connections. As in Certain Prey, this leads to more killings in an attempt to get rid of witnesses/confuse the police, who this time are assisted by a KGB (I think) agent sent over to help.

Again, a rather ludicrous plot, but again very entertaining to listen to. Will listen to more.

Read again in May 2012:

I'd always remembered this book as being a little poor, but assumed that perhaps this was because it was only the second Prey book I'd read and I hadn't got into the feel of the series.

But I think my impression was right - this is one of the weaker novels. In fact, it's a relatively recent one (2004 I think) and I think it shows Sandford starting to run out of ideas a bit. The writing is proficient as always, but there was not really much tension, and for a lot of the book I didn't understand what was going on - why were people doing what they did? And who was on what side?

Even though we have the advantage of seeing things from the killers' perspective from the start of the book, the reasons for their actions were not clear until nearly at the end, when one of them basically explains what he did. That felt a bit weak.

So, OK but not great.

Re-read again in 2014. And this time - after expecting it to be poor - I thought it was pretty good! In fact I'm not sure why I didn't like it before. Perhaps reading it in "context" (i.e. in the right order) has helped.

One thing I noticed was an error on the part of Richard Ferrone: there was reference in this book to a character from Easy Prey called Jael. I listened to that only a few weeks previously, so I remember Ferrone pronouncing it "Yah-El". But in this book he says "Jah-El". I was thinking "it's strange he makes that mistake when he only read the other book last month"

Completed : 16-Aug-2005 (audiobook, read by Richard Ferrone)

Completed : 30-May-2012 (audiobook, read by Richard Ferrone)

Completed : 30-Sep-2014 (audiobook, read by Richard Ferrone)