Now in his new job, Lucas takes on a particularly difficult and nasty case. A pair of robbers hit the counting house of a drug cartel in Biloxi, Mississippi, and escaped with several million dollars. In the process, they killed five people, including a six-year-old girl who was the granddaughter of one of the drug runners. The authorities believe that the man behind the robbery and murders was Garvin Poole, a particularly elusive killer who has managed to evade capture for years. Lucas now accepts the assignment of finding Poole and bringing him to justice.
The Feds are not the only one looking for Poole and his accomplices. The head of the drug cartel wants his money back and he also expects to make an example of anyone who would dare to attack his operation in this fashion. He sends a couple of assassins to begin working their way through Poole's family members and acquaintances, in an effort to force someone to give up his location. One of the assassins is a particularly large, ugly woman who enjoys torturing people with power tools.
Fairly soon, of course, Lucas and the assassins will cross paths, and the race is on to see who will get to Poole and the money he stole first, assuming that anyone can. It's a great chase across several states, with lots of action and plenty of intrigue, and in that respect, it's a hugely entertaining read. The problem, at least for me, is that, while we have here a character named Lucas Davenport--a guy who looks like Lucas Davenport and who dresses like Lucas Davenport, this does not seem remotely like a Lucas Davenport novel.
Early in the book, Davenport notes that in Minnesota he knew the state and its criminal element intimately. He had sources everywhere. He also had a team around him that he had depended on for years and with whom he had worked very closely. He confesses that, now out on the road, he's something of a fish out of water. So is the reader, and therein lies the rub.
Through the twenty-six Prey novels and Sandford's eleven Virgil Flowers books, the reader had also developed a fairly good understanding of the criminal world in Minnesota. The reader had also grown very well acquainted with, and often very fond of, the supporting cast that surrounded Davenport. As much of a cliche as it is, picking up one of these novels always was like meeting old friends on familiar ground. You knew what you were getting, and you couldn't wait to turn the first page.
As good as this book is, you get none of that here, and as a long-time reader, you can't help but feel a bit disappointed--or at least I couldn't. All of the old supporting cast is back up in Minnesota, along with Lucas's Porsche, and without them the book feels decidedly empty. In particular, Davenport has always had an interesting love life, even after his marriage, and one of the fun things about these books has always been the sexual banter between Lucas and the various women with whom he's been involved. That too is totally absent here. While there are a couple of female characters who doubtless would have interested Davenport while he was a single man, now that he's happily and faithfully married, the reader can only imagine the sparks that might have flown between Lucas and these women under different circumstances.
As an additional concern, Sandford sometimes strains a bit too hard to be cute. Too many of the southern males in this book have names that sound too distinctively like backwoods country bumpkins. A group of criminals is called the Dixie Hicks. Sandford does give Lucas a couple of new partners, two U.S. marshals who are, unbelievably, named Bob and Rae. If that weren't bad enough, Rae is a female whose last name is Givens.
Which brings us to the crux of the matter. The truth is that this could be a book featuring any U.S. Marshal. The protagonist could be John Smith, or Joe Jones, or practically anyone else. It could be Raylan Givens. But the hard fact is that there's little or nothing here that makes this book uniquely a Lucas Davenport novel.
I've been a huge fan of this series from the beginning and I can understand that Sandford might be tired of writing the character or that he may be running out of ideas for plots that leave Lucas in Minnesota. I can only say that as a significantly less-than-best-selling author, I can only dream about having those kinds of problems. But if that really is the case, maybe the better solution would have been for Sandford to put Davenport on the shelf for a while until he came up with a new inspiration for the character. In the meantime, he could have created an entirely new character, made him a federal marshal and put him in the middle of this plot. Unrestrained by the fact that he was writing Lucas Davenport, Sandford might have written here a book that was even more entertaining.
I have no idea where this series is going to go from here, and in some respects Sandford--and Lucas--may have burned their bridges. I'll keep my fingers crossed that the series somehow gets back to "normal" or that it quickly develops in a way that makes up for that. In the meantime, I'm very happy about the fact that I have all those earlier books on the shelf that I can reread at any time. The bottom line is that, while this is a very good book, I wish it had been a realLucas Davenport novel. 3.5 stars.
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