A Cold Whisper of Evil

Even before Alyssa Austin walks into her house to find the alarm system shut off and a trail of blood in the kitchen, she knows something is wrong: “The house was a modernist relic, glass and stone and redwood, sixty years old and gone creaky; not all haunted houses were Victorian. Sometimes at night, when she was alone, she’d feel a sudden coolness, as though somebody, or some thing, had just slipped by. This was different. She couldn’t pin it down, but it was palpable.” More frightening than realizing that her intuition is dead-on, Alyssa can’t reach her daughter Frances, who has been hanging out in the Goth community. When one of Frances’ Goth acquaintances is murdered, Alyssa asks Lucas Davenport to investigate. So begins Phantom Prey (Putnam, 384 pp., $26.95), the 18th novel in John Sandford’s New York Times best-selling series.

Davenport is reluctant at first. Not only does he think Alyssa Austin is a little New Age crazy, but he has his hands full planning for the Republican National Convention and staking out a Lithuanian mob boss’s girlfriend. Still, when more Goths are murdered, Davenport realizes that something is seriously amiss. And because the line between predator and prey becomes increasingly blurred, he could become the next victim if he doesn’t figure it out.

In his former career, Sandford, whose real name is John Camp, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and he has a journalist’s eye for telling details. Whether it’s a governor who likes to dole out fashion tips (“You always want your socks and your pajamas to be slightly gay”) or a description of the Minneapolis City Hall (“a wart poking through a diamond necklace”), Sandford knows his way around a memorable description. But it’s his characters that stay with the reader. Davenport and his cronies often seem like the typical cop characters, all bravado and crudeness. But these are men who care about their families, who get the shakes when thinking of dying too soon, and who can’t sleep the night after they are forced to kill a bad guy in the line of duty. They’re the reason readers can’t resist Sandford’s prey.

John Sandford will read and sign books at Davis-Kidd Booksellers 7 p.m. May 13.