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Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:�??One of [the] best�?� (Orlando Sentinel) Lucas Davenport Novels�??now with a New Introduction by the Author. Clara Rinker is twenty-eight, beautiful, charmingly southern�??and the best hit woman in the business. She just goes about her business, collects her money, and goes home. Her latest hit sounds simple: a defense attorney wants a rival eliminated. No problem�??until a witness survives. Clara usually knows how to deal with loose ends: cut them off, one by one, until they're all gone. This time, there�??s one loose end that�??s hard to shake. Lucas Davenport has no idea of the toll this case is about to take on him. Clara knows his weak spots. She knows how to penetrate them, and how to use them. And when a woman like Clara has the advan… (more)
User reviews
This is the tenth book in the Prey series by John Sandford, which remains as fresh at this point as at the beginning. Lucas Davenport is an engaging character, an intelligent and intense investigator who enjoys his career chasing killers. Although there is no actual mystery to figure out here, which marks this as more of a thriller, the chase by Davenport and several strong secondary characters is fine-tuned and all the more enjoyable to follow.
It's the one with the lawyer who hires someone to kill her beloved's wife, so they can get together. She finds the eminently professional Clara Rinken who does everything
Lucas is up to his old tricks and plays his usual mind games. I liked this one. Clara is a terrific character, so good in fact, that Sandford uses her again in a later book...
The plot revolves around Rinker being hired to kill the wife of Minneapolis attorney Hale Allen. Why? Seems the woman who hired Rinker, high-powered Minneapolis attorney Carmen Loan, is fatally infatuated with Allen and hopes, with his wife out of the way, to become the second Mrs. Allen. The character of Carmen Loan is clearly the weakest element of the book - a highly intelligent, successful, ruthless nutjob in the mode of "Fatal Attraction"'s Alex Forrest. She has better taste in clothes than in men, attracted to Allen for the shallowest reasons and willing to engage in many more murders to cover her tracks. By contrast, Clara Rinker, while generally dispassionate about her job (though she will not murder a child witness), is generally clear-headed and highly professional. Her loneliness as a free-lance executioner with mob ties, causes her to bond with Carmen as a BFF, and that throws a serious kink into her business model.
This book really is a procedural - how and why do Rinker and Loan plan their murders and subsequent actions to deflect the police and FBI away from them; and do how the cops, led by Davenport, track them down. In the end, Carmen follows her lunatic plans right down the line; Clara Rinker, not so much, and that's another good thing about "Certain Prey."
I wonder whether the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce has a love/hate relationship with John Sandford. He brings attention to the city and shines a glowing light on its law enforcement professionals. He also avoids the "Fargo" cliches about Minnesotans (yes, I loved the movie). But he also amps up the murder rate in Minneapolis beyond what would seem believable. If you can suspend reality on that, and if you can swallow Carmen Loan as a character, this is a book to enjoy. I did.
Lucas Davenport is a detective in Minnesota and is after a murderer. You
Need a little excitement in your reading than I suggest you give Certain Prey a try.
Highly entertaining.
Clara Rinker is a hitwoman. Raped after working one evening as a stripper at a nudie bar, she arranges with her bosses to have the man who raped her brought back to the bar so she can his hands. Deciding that wasn’t enough, she kills him, and the bar owners, impressed by her passion and lack of remorse, enlist her as a part-time hitperson for the St. Louis mob. She’s also very smart, but lonely, a fact that leads to some difficulties when she is hired by Carmel Loan, a successful lawyer in Minneapolis, to kill the wife of the man Carmel has the lust for. The killing succeeds but everything gets really complicated when she also has to shoot a policeman surreptitiously on his way for a hamburger. The cop is not killed and the complication arises that he might be able to identify her. Then Carmel learns that the love of her life has been having an affair with a secretary, and to make things worse, the drug dealer she hired to put her in contact with the hitman — notice how I’ve cleverly used all the appropriate endings to satisfy everyone – has sent a blackmail note revealing he kept a videotape of their conversation that recorded Loan requesting the hit. The denouement is quite satisfying. Lucas is an interesting character, albeit not as well developed perhaps as one would like, perhaps because he has been explained more in previous novels. He makes some very funny comments about a six-hundred-page report he has to read entitled “The Mayor’s Select Commission on Cultural Diversity, Alternative Lifestyles, and Other Ableness in the Minneapolis Police Department: A Preliminary Approach to Divergent Modalities” [Executive Summary] — otherwise known as the Perfection Report, or The Wellness Thing, or the Wholeness Report or the Otherness Report. It’s a very thick report that literally saves Lucas’s bacon — well, maybe not his bacon.