Lucas Davenport (abridged)

The company chairman lay on the cold ground of the woods, his eyes unseeing, his orange hunting jacket punctured by a rifle bullet at close range. Around him stood the four executives with whom he had been hunting, each with his or her own complicated agenda, each with a reason not to be sorrowful about the man's death.

Her name is Clara Rinker, a southern woman, trim, pleasant, attractive, and the best hit woman in the business. She isn't showy; she just goes quietly about her business, collects her money, and goes home.

With each new book, John Sandford's Lucas Davenport novels grow deeper, richer, more suspenseful, and their audience grows even larger. The best, however, is yet to come.

The "Big Three" are a trio of inmates locked up in the Minnesota Security Hospital over the years, each a particularly vicious serial killer, each with his own distinct style and propensities. Everybody feels much safer knowing that they're behind bars. Except...there's a new killer on the loose. And his handiwork bears a disturbing resemblance to some of the finer points practiced by the Big Three, details that never even made the papers.

In the richest neighborhood of Minneapolis, two elderly women lie murdered in their home, killed with a pipe, the rooms tossed but only small items stolen. It is clearly the random work of someone looking for money to buy drugs. But as Lucas Davenport looks more closely, he begins to wonder whether the items are actually so small and the victims so random - if there might not be some invisible agenda at work. Gradually, a pattern begins to emerge, and it leads him to...certainly nothing he ever expected.

Lucas Davenport has had disturbing cases before - but never one quite like this, in this shocking Prey novel from the number-one New York Times best-selling author. 

Very early, 4:45, on a bitterly cold Minnesota morning, three big men burst through the door of a hospital pharmacy, duct-tape the hands, feet, mouth, and eyes of two pharmacy workers, and clean the place out. But then things swiftly go bad, one of the workers dies, and the robbers hustle out to their truck-and find themselves for just one second face-to-face with a blond woman in the garage: Weather Karkinnen, surgeon, wife of an investigator named Lucas Davenport.

Lucas Davenport's first case as a US marshal sends him into uncharted territory in the thrilling new novel in the number one New York Times best-selling series. Thanks to some very influential people whose lives he saved, Lucas is no longer working for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension but for the US Marshals Service, and with unusual scope. He gets to pick his own cases, whatever they are, wherever they lead him.