{"id":2385,"date":"2005-06-16T04:26:00","date_gmt":"2005-06-16T09:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=2385"},"modified":"2010-04-20T22:54:18","modified_gmt":"2010-04-21T03:54:18","slug":"book-report-easy-prey-by-john-sandford-2000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/16\/book-report-easy-prey-by-john-sandford-2000\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Easy Prey by John Sandford (2000)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I inherited <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/tg\/detail\/-\/039914613X\/ref=lpr_g_1\/103-6845702-9550268?v=glance&#038;s=books\" target=\"_new\">this book<\/a> from my aunt along with a couple of the next books in the series.  Amazon informs me this is the eleventh book in the series, so I&#8217;ve undoubtedly missed a lot of the references and asides within this book that allude to incidents which the long-time fans of the Lucas Davenport novels would recognize.  Each time I hit one of these many references, I recognized it for what it was, but I let it go.  I know what a Robert B. Parker fan who started with <i>Hugger Mugger<\/i> must feel.<\/p>\n<p>The book starts, chapter 1, in the mind of the killer with a bunch of foreshadowing; the killer awakens and doesn&#8217;t know he&#8217;s going to kill someone later, but he does.  Honestly, given the plot of the book, ultimately the cheap foreshadowing doesn&#8217;t hang right with the rest of the plot.  But the frenetic nature of the action, with the multitude of police characters and considerations in handling a case, one can overlook them&#8211;or forget the first chapter by the time the bodies start to pile up.<\/p>\n<p><b>Good points:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Set in Minnesota, which is the upper Midwest.  Although they worship the pagan Vikings and even refer to them once in the book, they&#8217;re of good Scandinaviagerman stock like my ancestors in Wisconsin.\n<li>Frantic pace of novel, coupled with allusions to previous novels, intimates an incident in a line and a past to which the characters are privy even if you, fool who starts with book eleven, are not.\n<li>Main character, in mid forties or so, is: rich due to his sale of a computer company; drives a Porsche due to his wealth; juggles attractive women of his own age with 20-something models; and serves as a deputy chief of police who bends the ear of the chief and the mayor.\n<p>Face it, he&#8217;s the hardboiled fantasy from the 1940s or 1960s aged a couple decades.<\/ul>\n<p><b>Bad points:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The intro, foreshadowing chapter is ultimately misleading.\n<li>Multiple murderers throw the investigation off.  Also, they confuse the reader.\n<li>Multiple murderers mean that the bulk of the book spends time chasing red herrings.\n<li>Book is split between whodunit and high level police procedural; the first chapter would indicate whodunit, but who does it doesn&#8217;t depend upon clues given but late breaking developments and insights and, frankly, who&#8217;s not dead among the suspect pool at the end.<\/ul>\n<p>Still, the pacing of the book and the engagement of the characters&#8211;or at least the condolence of the main character to the adolescent fantasies that carry over into adulthood&#8211;carried me along to the end.  I have two other books in the series, and I look forward to reading them.  They will determine whether I backfill the previous novels and buy more recent novels.  Overall, I&#8217;m optimistic, which is the most I can say for any suspense series I&#8217;ve picked up in a while (barring the Robert Crais books which, gentle reader, you remember I started out optimistic and sort of soured).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I inherited this book from my aunt along with a couple of the next books in the series. Amazon informs me this is the eleventh book in the series, so I&#8217;ve undoubtedly missed a lot of the references and asides within this book that allude to incidents which the long-time fans of the Lucas Davenport [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2385"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6233,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2385\/revisions\/6233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}