Righteous Prey by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on October 4, 2022

Righteous Prey is a Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers crossover novel. Davenport novels are usually a bit darker than Flowers novels. Righteous Prey is essentially a buddy novel that balances humor and darkness. Davenport and Flowers banter their way through the plot as they try to stop five killers who are targeting assholes. The reader might have trouble deciding whether to cheer for the killers or for the cops.

Five billionaires who became wealthy through bitcoin investments are bored. They meet Vivian Zhao at a bitcoin convention. Zhao persuades them that the country is full of assholes who need killing and that people with money and time on their hands are well positioned to kill them. Zhao doesn’t have money of her own but she’s full of anger, largely because she doesn’t have money of her own. She’s taking out her anger on assholes by organizing a group that identifies itself as The Five. Each killing is accompanied by a press release taking credit for making the world a better place, one asshole at a time.

Readers who condemn John Sandford for being liberal (Amazon “reviews” suggest that those readers are plentiful) might be happy to learn that the killers are liberals. They are, at least, fed up with conservative and/or racist assholes. One victim is a criminal who preys on elderly Asians. One is a corrupt Texas politician who rails against migrants. One operates a hedge fund that acquires businesses and fires their employees. One might as well be Alex Jones.

Sandford likes to play with the professional rivalries between the FBI, the federal Marshals, and state or local cops. The “real cops” view the FBI’s “Special Agents” as useless, a perception that Sandford borrows from the real world. In this novel as in many of Sandford’s, all law enforcers not named Davenport or Flowers are just getting in the way.

The novel makes a strong indictment of bump stocks (as did the shooter in the Las Vegas massacre), not that the NRA or Republican state attorneys general care about mass shootings. To a lesser extent (primarily through a brief televised appearance by the wives of Davenport and Flowers), the novel spotlights ghost guns and suppressors, contributors to gun violence that don’t seem to be on any national politician’s radar.

The plot’s lighter side focuses on banter about Flowers’ fledgling career as a thriller novelist. He is finishing his second novel and just signed a contract for a third. I enjoyed the Inside Baseball view of publishing — just enough information to offer a glimpse of writing as a profession without bogging down the story. The best advice Flowers gets is from another cop: “Don’t make your hero into superman. . . . You know, they’re in thirty-two gunfights in three days against a hundred terrorists and get a flesh wound in the shoulder.” That’s a pet peeve I share, although it’s even worse in movies than in novels.

Fortunately, Sandford limits the shootouts but still manages to keep the story in motion. Action doesn’t always need to consist of gunplay and fistfights, although there is a realistic gunfight at the novel’s end. Sandford is never afraid to have Lucas and/or Flowers sustain more than a flesh wound, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t discuss the battle’s outcome. It suffices to say that this is a thriller with real thrills and that bullets fired rapidly with a bump stock have consequences.

There isn’t much to say about a Sandford novel. They’re always compulsively readable. This one is no exception. The Inside Baseball paragraphs about writing explain how to make a decent income writing thrillers. Not everyone can do it. Sandford deserves every penny he earns.

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