I first met Lucas Davenport over twenty years ago when a ruthless killer named Louis Vullion was terrifying the Twin Cities. Davenport was my kind of cop, a loner embracing a single-minded sense of justice, driving through life in his Porsche that attracted nearly as much attention as the women he was seen with. That book, Rules of Prey, sits proudly in my collection followed by nineteen more Prey thrillers, the latest being this year’s Storm Prey.
Not too long after, I had the pleasure of meeting John Camp, aka John Sandford. We sat together and talked as he signed stock for our fledgling mail order business.
During that first meeting he told me that he took his grandfather’s name when his publisher insisted on something different than Camp for the Prey books. Since that time Camp, turned Sandford, has signed for us every book to come along, and the list is quite impressive.
In addition to the twenty novels featuring Lucas Davenport, he has written four in the Kidd series (two as Camp, two as Sandford), two showing us the razor-edge world of the Night Crew, and more recently four books featuring Virgil Flowers, a gun-totin' cop who looks, dresses, and acts a lot more like a road-weary drifter than your stereotypical bullet-headed Raybanned badge-wearer. Flowers works for Davenport, only drawing the most difficult assignments.
John Sandford has been writing brilliantly suspenseful, consistently surprising thrillers filled with rich characters and exceptional drama since 1989, three years
after winning the Pulitzer Prize as a features reporter for the Pioneer Press in St. Paul.
If you aren’t familiar with Camp, Sandford, Davenport, or Flowers . . . just where have you been hiding?
John
