A Prey Novel

A house demolition provides an unpleasant surprise for Minneapolis - the bodies of two girls, wrapped in plastic. It looks like they've been there a long time. Lucas Davenport knows exactly how long.In 1985, Davenport was a young cop with a reputation for recklessness, and the girls' disappearance was a big deal. His bosses ultimately declared the case closed, but he never agreed with that. Now that he has a chance to investigate it all over again, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: It wasn't just the bodies that were buried. It was the truth.

.Lucas Davenport has seen many terrible murder scenes. This is one of the worst. In the small Minnesota town of Deephaven, an entire family has been killed - husband, wife, two daughters, dogs. There’s something about the scene that pokes at Lucas’s cop instincts - it looks an awful lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution he’s seen in drug killings sometimes. But this is a seriously upscale town, and the husband was an executive vice president at a big bank. It just doesn’t seem to fit.

Murder. Scandal. Politics. And one billionaire heiress so dangerous in so many ways. An explosive Lucas Davenport thriller from number one New York Times best-selling author John Sandford. All hell has broken loose in the capital. An influential state senator has been caught with something very, very nasty on his office computer. The governor can’t believe it - the senator’s way too smart for that, even if he is from the other party. Something’s not right.

The night after the fourth of July, Layton Carlson, Jr., of Red Wing, Minnesota, finally got lucky. And unlucky.

He’d picked the perfect spot to lose his virginity to his girlfriend, an abandoned farmyard in the middle of cornfields: nice, private, and quiet. The only problem was...something smelled bad - like, really bad. He mentioned it to a county deputy he knew, and when the cop took a look, he found a body stuffed down a cistern. And then another, and another. By the time Lucas Davenport was called in, the police were up to 15 bodies and counting.

A terrifying Lucas Davenport thriller from number one New York Times best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize–winner John Sandford. They call them Travelers. They move from city to city, panhandling, committing no crimes - they just like to stay on the move. And now somebody is killing them. Lucas Davenport’s adopted daughter, Letty, is home from college when she gets a phone call from a woman Traveler she’d befriended in San Francisco. The woman thinks somebody’s killing her friends, she’s afraid she knows who it is, and now her male companion has gone missing.

After the events in Gathering Prey, Lucas Davenport finds himself in a very unusual situation - no longer employed by the Minnesota BCA. His friend, the governor, is just cranking up a presidential campaign, though, and he invites Lucas to come along as part of his campaign staff. "Should be fun!" he says, and it kind of is - until they find they have a shadow: an armed man intent on killing the governor...and anyone who gets in the way.

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.

Lucas Davenport had crossed paths with her before. A rich psychopath, Taryn Grant had run successfully for the US Senate, where Lucas had predicted she'd fit right in. He was also convinced that she'd been responsible for three murders, though he'd never been able to prove it. Once a psychopath had gotten that kind of rush, though, he or she often needed another fix, so he figured he might be seeing her again. He was right.

Lucas Davenport had crossed paths with her before. A rich psychopath, Taryn Grant had run successfully for the US Senate, where Lucas had predicted she'd fit right in. He was also convinced that she'd been responsible for three murders, though he'd never been able to prove it. He was right. A federal marshal now, with a very wide scope of investigation, he's heard rumours that Grant has found her seat on the Senate intelligence committee, and the contacts she's made from it, to be very...useful.

Clayton Deese looks like a small-time criminal, muscle for hire when his loan shark boss needs to teach someone a lesson. Now, seven months after a job that went south and landed him in jail, Deese has skipped out on bail, and the US Marshals come looking for him. They don't much care about a low-level guy - it's his boss they want - but Deese might be their best chance to bring down the whole operation. Then, they step onto a dirt trail behind Deese's rural Louisiana cabin and find a jungle full of graves.

The daughter of a US Senator is monitoring her social media presence when she finds a picture of herself on a strange blog. And there are other pictures...of the children of other influential Washington politicians, walking or standing outside their schools, each identified by name. Surrounding the photos are texts of vicious political rants from a motley variety of radical groups. It's obviously alarming - is there an unstable extremist tracking the loved ones of powerful politicians with deadly intent? But when the FBI is called in, there isn't much the feds can do.

An off-duty coast guardsman is fishing with his family when he calls in some suspicious behaviour from a nearby boat. It's a snazzy craft, slick and outfitted with extra horsepower, and is zipping along until it slows to pick up a surfaced diver...a diver who was apparently alone, without his own boat, in the middle of the ocean. None of it makes sense, and his hunch is proved right when all three guardsmen who come out to investigate are shot and killed.

An off-duty Coast Guardsman is fishing with his family when he calls in some suspicious behavior from a nearby boat. It's a snazzy craft, slick and outfitted with extra horsepower, and is zipping along until it slows to pick up a surfaced diver...a diver who was apparently alone, without his own boat, in the middle of the ocean. None of it makes sense unless there's something hinky going on, and his hunch is proved right when all three Guardsmen who come out to investigate are shot and killed.

So begins a press release from a mysterious group known only as “The Five,” shortly after a vicious predator is murdered in San Francisco. The Five is made up of vigilante killers who are very bored…and very rich. They target the worst of society—rapists, murderers, and thieves—and then use their unlimited resources to offset the damage done by those who they’ve killed, donating untraceable Bitcoin to charities and victims via the dark net. The Five soon become popular figures in the media …though their motives may not be entirely pure.

A group of vigilantes known only as ‘The Five' are targeting the worst of society – rapists, murderers and thieves – and they use their unlimited resources to offset the damage done by those who they've killed, donating untraceable Bitcoin to charities and victims via the Dark Web. Soon, they are the most popular figures on social media . . . but their motives may not be entirely pure.

Alex Sand was spending the evening at home playing basketball with his two young sons when all three were shot in cold blood. A wealthy federal judge, there’s no short list of people who could have a vendetta against Sands, but the gruesome murders, especially that of his children, turn their St. Paul community on its head. Sand was on the verge of a major donation to a local housing charity, Heart/Twin Cities, and with the money in limbo, eyes suddenly turn to his grieving widow, Margaret Cooper, to see what she might do with the money.

When federal judge Alex Sand and his two young sons are shot in cold blood at their family home, the brutality of the murders leaves their wealthy St. Paul community reeling. There's no shortage of people with a vendetta against the judge, but the collapse of a major charitable donation he had planned complicates things further, leaving the money in limbo and all eyes on his grief-stricken widow. As public pressure mounts and both the local police force and the FBI hit one dead end after another, it isn't long before Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers are called in.

Gaia is dying. That, at least, is what Dr. Lionel Scott believes. A renowned expert in tropical and infectious diseases, Scott has witnessed the devastating impact of illness and turmoil at critical scale. Society as it exists is untenable, and the direct link to Earth’s death spiral; population levels are out of control and people have allowed disarray and disorder to run rampant. While most are concerned about deadly disease, Scott knows that it is truly humanity itself that will destroy Gaia.

When Scott then disappears without a trace, Letty Davenport is tasked with tracking down any and all leads. Scott's connections to sensitive research into virus and pathogen spread has multiple national and international organizations on high alert, and his shockingly high clearance levels at various institutions, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, make him the last person they'd like to go missing.