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Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 33607002704008 | Adult Fiction | SANDFOR | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Author Notes
John Sandford was born John Roswell Camp on February 23, 1944 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Before entering the U.S. Army and serving in Korea, he received a bachelor's degree in American history from the University of Iowa in 1966. After leaving the service, he received a master's degree in journalism from the University of Iowa.
During the 1970s, he worked at The Miami Herald, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In 1985, he began researching the lives of a farm family caught in the midst of the crisis of American farming. The article, Life on the Land: An American Farm Family, won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Non-Deadline Feature Writing.
After winning the Pulitzer Prize, he began writing fiction. His works include the Prey series, the Virgil Flowers series, and The Singular Menace series. He has also written nonfiction works on plastic surgery and art.
Sandford's Young Adult novels, Uncaged and Outrage, Books 1 and 2 of The Singular Menace Series co-written with Michelle Cook, made the New York Times Bestseller list in July 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Anna Batory, thin and "rail-hard" with "pale blue killer eyes," runs a small, independent TV-news night crew that peddles clips of crime scenes, fires, car crashes and other mayhem to local TV stations for a tidy profit. As always with Sandford (Sudden Prey), the novel opens on action, in this case the crew's taping of a lab break-in by animal-rights activists and of a drug-crazed teenager's jump from a hotel window. The crew moves from voyeurs of the action to unwilling participants when Anna's part-time cameraman is shot dead and mutilated and a friend of his is murdered in an equally grisly manner. It becomes increasingly clear that a psycho is stalking Anna and her crew. To nail him, she teams up with the divorced father of the jumper, lawyer and ex-cop Jake Harper. Anna, Jake and another crew member and his new girlfriend are all attacked by the psycho before the gory finale. The shift from his usual Minneapolis setting to L.A. brings out the noir in Sandford ("the real dawn, a great, unhappy light, like an old piece of newspaper being pushed over the mountains"), and the action and suspense are up to his usual high standard. But Anna is neither as appealing nor as complex as his customary hero, Lucas Davenport, and other characters also seem grey at times, their movements perfunctory. One can't blame Sandford for wanting to try something new after eight "Prey" novels since 1989 (Sudden Prey, etc.), plus two thrillers under his real name, John Camp, but let's hope we haven't seen the last of Lucas. BOMC main selection; Putnam Berkley audio; author tour. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal Review
The author of eight previous thrillers in his "Prey" series (e.g., Sudden Prey, LJ 4/1/96), Sandford here provides an action-packed novel. Anna Batory, deceptively thin and small for a woman who is both emotionally and physically tough, heads an L.A. unit of video freelancers who search for news by night. The story begins in medias res with the crew covering first an animal rights protest and then a young man's jumping from a building to his death. That night, Jason O'Brien, Anna's back-up cameraman, is viciously slain. It soon becomes apparent that the violence is connected to and aimed at Anna. Jake Harper, a former policeman and father of the jumper, becomes Anna's bodyguard and lover. This thriller has an appealing heroine and well-developed secondary characters. The dialog is clever and hard-edged, black humor abounds, and the romance factor is handled deftly. Unfortunately, while the villain is sufficiently vicious and his crimes grisly, he ultimately comes across as pathetic rather than menacing. Still, Sanford fans will not be disappointed; this is an exciting thriller. Recommended for general readers. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/96.]‘Jacqueline Seewald, Red Bank Regional H.S., Little Silver, N.J. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.