Lethal Prey by John Sandford

Published by ‎ G.P. Putnam's Sons on March 25, 2025

Nobody uses humor to soften the drama of crime as effectively as John Sandford. Few other writers have produced a long running series of crime novels with such immensely likable characters. Lethal Prey follows Sandford’s winning formula by mixing drama and humor to tell a good story.

Deputy U.S. Marshal Lucas Davenport is the protagonist of the Prey novels. Lucas has a comfortable life thanks to wealth he earned from building and selling a tech business when he was working for Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). Lucas left law enforcement to focus on his business but returned to it because he missed chasing bad guys. He often becomes involved in cases at the request of politicians (including the senator who slotted him into his current position), providing him with a shield against bureaucrats.

Lucas’ friend Virgil Flowers has his own series, but the two often team up for the reader’s pleasure. Virgil works for BCA but has published three novels and is working on his fourth during Lethal Prey. Virgil hopes he can quit BCA and make writing a fulltime career.

As he often does, Sandford begins the novel by showing the reader a crime as it unfolds. Lethal Prey isn’t a whodunit from the reader’s perspective because we see Amanda Fisk fly into a rage and murder a young woman who was shagging her boyfriend. The reader soon learns that Fisk is a psychopath. Through a combination of luck and smarts, she managed to conceal her involvement in the murder. It has gone unsolved for two decades.

The murder victim, Doris Grandfelt, was working as a clerk in an accounting firm where Fisk also worked. Fisk’s soon-to-be husband, Timothy Carlson, was a client of the firm. Timothy did the deed with Doris after business hours on a couch in the accounting offices. Using a table knife from the company cafeteria that she sharpened against a brick wall, Fisk stabbed Doris to death after Timothy left, then buried her body in a wooded park near her childhood home.

Twenty-one years later, Doris’ twin sister, Lara Grandfelt, decides to spend her fortune to reopen the case and find her sister’s killer. Lara is a significant donor to a senator’s political campaign. The senator happens to be Lucas’ benefactor. He pulls strings to make Lucas part of the renewed investigation. Virgil joins the team with the hope that he’ll avoid the daily drudge of his BCA duties and devote more time to his novel.

Sandford often grounds his novels in current events or social trends. Lethal Prey focuses on true crime blogs and podcasts. To bring fresh eyes and extra manpower to the investigation, Lara invites the true crime community to compete for a large reward. The results are hilarious. Much of the novel’s comedy comes from true crime podcasters competing with other, not just to win the reward, but to be first to break each new clue and thus attract more clicks to their websites.

Lucas and Virgil cringe at the thought of involving amateurs in the investigation. As Lucas explains with tongue embedded in cheek:

“Every one of them has a website and they live on clicks and followers. If they get enough clicks, they can get ads from true crime publishers. Some of them probably make upwards of eight hundred dollars a year.”

The real cops nevertheless take advantage of crowdsourcing resources. For example, they provide old photos recovered from Lara’s camera to be posted on the websites with the hope that viewers will identify men who might have known (or slept with) Doris twenty years earlier. The true crime bloggers turn out to be useful when they aren’t fighting with each other.

Following their usual pattern, Lucas and Virgil leave the pavement pounding to officers with less seniority while they analyze the evidence and identify the important interviews that they should do themselves. Fisk is now a prosecutor and thus knows how criminals get caught, so she takes care to get rid of evidence that Lucas, Virgil, and the bloggers might find as they revitalize the investigation. A couple more murders ensue as she covers her tracks. She also targets Virgil in an effort to distract hiim from the investigation.

Fisk makes mistakes in judgment along the way. Will Lucas and Virgil puzzle out the small clues she leaves behind? While series fans will know the answer to that one, the process of detection is the most entertaining feature of these novels — apart from the snarky dialog.

The Prey series is remarkable for its steadiness. Every novel seems fresh. While the personalities of its main characters are familiar to fans of the series, each book allows the characters to grow a bit. Sandford finds the right balance of credible storytelling and atmosphere as his characters roam around Minnesota, northern Iowa, and western Wisconsin. Collateral characters display the eccentricities of people who live in that part of the Midwest without mocking them. Lethal Prey won’t disappoint series fans and, since each novel stands alone, new readers can pick it up without worrying that they’ve missed too much background to understand the story.

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The Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip Fracassi

Published by Orbit on March 18, 2025

Time travel stories can be fun but doing them right can be tricky. Authors usually take note of the paradox — kill your grandfather in the past and you never come into existence and thus can’t travel to the past to kill your grandfather — but they don’t always address it effectively. One approach is to avoid the paradox by traveling to the future. Another is to travel observationally, watching the past through a lens without interacting with it and thus avoiding changes. Another is to travel to the past with the intent to change nothing, usually followed by a mishap that changes everything. Another is to have the traveler change something that doesn’t prevent her birth and then returning to the past to undo the change. Another is to assume the existence of multiple time streams, so that changing the past either shifts the observed reality into a different stream or begins a new one. Perhaps because The Third Rule of Time Travel incorporates all these approaches to varying degrees, it fails to tell a convincing story.

Beth Darlow and her husband Colson invented a time travel machine. The device opens a wormhole that transports the traveler’s mind into her body at an earlier time. The two minds cohabit in the traveler’s past body although (for reasons left unexplained) the past mind doesn’t seem to recall the visit from future self after the experience ends. The mind transported from the present, on the other hand, is aware of the past mind and recalls what she observed through her past self’s eyes. The only physical evidence that two minds are sharing a body is a whitening of the eyes in the traveler’s body while it’s inhabited.

The travel ends after ninety seconds. A skeptic might think that the machine is merely stimulating memories and not transporting the traveler, but evidence (other than the temporary change of eye color) eventually emerges to suggest that a mostly useless form of time travel has actually occurred.

Colson died in a car crash, leaving Beth to further the research and to replace him as the time traveler. Beth is trying to understand how the time machine chooses arrival points. She thinks that directing time travel to a specific date will make the machine more useful, but the traveler will still observe only the things she has already seen. I can imagine some scenarios where that might be helpful (a crime victim who can’t identify an assailant might notice more details when revisiting the assault), but a lot of money is being invested in technology that hardly seems to justify the cost.

The research is funded by a creep who wants profitable results. His efforts to attract new investors cause Beth to take risks. This leads to an inevitable confrontation between the investor, who believes he has exclusive rights to the invention, and Beth, who is one of the few people who understand how the contraption works. It turns out that her understanding is less than complete.

When Beth begins traveling, she notices that the machine always sends her back to traumatic moments in her life, including identifying her husband’s body in the morgue. Beth eventually realizes why that’s happening, but the explanation [spoiler alert] amounts to “the universe doesn’t like to be messed with.” Nonsense of that sort bleeds the science out of science fiction.

Beth begins to see the ghost of her dead husband. Then she changes the past in a way I won’t spoil. How she does that is never made clear, a startling omission since one of the titular rules is that travelers can’t interact with the past and thus can’t change it. I guess we’re supposed to accept the theory that observing a quantum system causes it to change, but the application of that theory to the plot is disappointingly fuzzy.

Beth only knows the past was changed because, before she travels, she sends answers to certain questions to an off-planet location where they won’t be affected by any changes to Earth history. (This has something to do with the inverse square law and the assumption that the machine’s energy pulse will lose its energy as it travels away from the Earth, leaving the pre-recorded answers invulnerable to change.) The story’s tense moments result from Beth’s desire to undo the changes she made and the owner’s desire to stop her from revealing the harm that his useless but expensive technology might cause.

The setup is interesting even if Beth isn’t. The story’s resolution combines metaphysical gibberish with simplistic pseudoscience. Now, there’s so much we don’t understand about the universe that maybe Philip Fracassi got it right, but other writers have made a more convincing case [second spoiler alert] that time is an illusion, that there is only the now, and that the now encompasses all possible pasts and futures. This convenient theory empowers Beth to construct the reality she wants and thus enables a happy ending, but science fiction’s demand that readers suspend their disbelief needs to be supported by a plausible reason to do so. Metaphysical gibberish about an angry universe and simplistic pseudoscience didn’t get me there, particularly when the ending doesn’t address the many ramifications of the story’s underlying theory.

That leaves us with a conventional thriller — a race to save the present by undoing changes to the past — surrounded by the trappings of science fiction. This science fiction thriller is more effective as a thriller than as science fiction, but the thriller aspects are unoriginal. Thriller fans might nevertheless enjoy it. Hardcore sf fans, not so much.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

Published in Japan in 2023; published in translation by Hogarth on March 18, 2025

One gift that authors give readers is the opportunity to exercise empathy. By reading about lives that are not their own, readers gain an understanding of people that extends beyond the knowledge they gain from personal contacts. Reading the first-person narrator’s account of her life in Hunchback opens a window on the life that a Japanese woman might live when she is physically impaired by a severe disability.

Shaka Izawa (like the author) suffers from myotubular myopathy, a rare genetic disorder that causes severe muscle weakness. The condition has affected the curvature of her spine, leaving it “twisted so as to crush my right lung.” As the novel’s title suggests, her body has taken the form of a hunchback. “As a consequence, my way of walking was sufficiently imbalanced to make the word ‘limp’ seem an understatement, and whenever I lost focus, I’d strike my head on the left-hand side of the door frame.

Shaka had a tracheostomy to ease her breathing. She needs the assistance of a ventilator to breathe when she lies on her back. She uses a suction catheter to drain mucus from her windpipe. She needs to cover the hole in her throat to speak, but she doesn’t do so often because speaking increases her mucus production.

Shaka is fortunate to have been born to financially secure parents who assured that she would receive the lifelong care she needs. Shaka owns a building that her parents converted into a group home. She has lived there for since her early teens. Caregivers prepare her meals and help her bathe, as they do for the other disabled residents.

For nearly thirty years, Shaka has not set foot outside the building where she lives. She never has visitors, apart from healthcare professionals and the people who service her ventilator. Saou Ichikawa makes the point that Japanese culture relegates the disabled to the status of nonpersons. Japan, she tells the reader, “works on the understanding that disabled people don’t exist within society.” Keeping the disabled out of sight spares the abled members of society the discomfort of recognizing that some people do not share abilities that they take for granted. The American push for inclusion of the disabled (which will likely be set back by deliberate misunderstandings of what DEI means) has evidently not taken root in Japan.

To help pass the time, Shaka takes remote classes at a university. She’s working on her second degree. She also writes porn. She donates her earnings from porn production to food banks, shelters for homeless girls, and charities for orphans.

Shaka’s focus on sexual pleasure in her part-time work provides another opportunity for Ichikawa to contrast the lives of “normal” people in Japan with the lives of the disabled. Sexual desire is normal, no less so for the disabled, but Japanese society isn’t prepared to accept the notion of a severely disabled individual having a sexual encounter. Hunchback may be an attempt to provoke change in society’s willingness to accept that disabled individuals may be just as interested in sex as the nondisabled.

The novel opens with one of Shaka’s porn stories, an account of a woman visiting a sex club. Her date and another couple adjourn to a private room where they engage in sex acts while patrons on the other side of the glass walls masturbate. We later learn that on the site for which she writes, the greatest demand “among male users is first-hand accounts of various adult entertainment venues or lists of top-twenty pickup spots, together with adverts for dating and hook-up apps, while among women, it’s lists of the top-twenty shrines to pray at for rekindling romance, together with adverts for psychic hotlines.”

Shaka is a virgin, but her “ultimate dream” is to get pregnant and have an abortion. The shape of her skeleton would prevent her from giving birth, but she has the biological ability to conceive an embryo. She sees pregnancy and abortion as a means of living “like a normal woman.”

Shaka tweets her thoughts and fantasies (including working as a high-end prostitute) with the assumption that nobody reads them. She’s surprised to learn that one of her male caretakers has, in fact, followed them. For a price, he seems willing to make her fantasy come true. At the same time, his distaste for Shaka is evident. Shaka realizes that the “appropriate distance between us was one that allowed him to pity me.” Their abbreviated sexual encounter leaves the reader wondering which of them was more affected by the experience.

The novel is filled with insights into the life experiences of a severely disabled woman. The discussion of abortion is particularly telling. Shaka tells the reader that Japanese women routinely abort fetuses to avoid giving birth to a disabled child. Shaka’s fetus could be genetically unimpaired, so she sees an intentional pregnancy for the purpose of having an abortion as an attempt to “balance the scales.”

The story ends by transitioning back to the world of porn, this time featuring Shaka playing out her fantasy life as a prostitute. Yet this time Shaka is not the porn’s creator but a character imagined by the creator, a character who writes porn as “a way for her to survive in society.” The narrator considers that “maybe I myself don’t exist,” circling back to the earlier theme of disabled people living invisible lives, hidden from a society that prefers not to be disturbed by knowledge that some lives are less fortunate than their own.

Hunchback is a powerful and sometimes disturbing work. Readers who are willing to move outside their comfort zones to consider experiences that they cannot easily imagine will find ample opportunities to exercise their compassion in Saou Ichikawa’s semi-autobiographical novel.

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Friends Helping Friends by Patrick Hoffman

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on March 18, 2025

Friends Helping Friends tells an unusual crime story. For that reason alone, the novel is better than its more predictable competitors.

The novel’s first half focuses on Bunny Simpson, Jerry LeClair, and Helen McCalla. Helen is a lawyer who has issues with her ex-husband and his new wife. Helen pours her heartbreak into exercise, then scores steroids from a gym rat to fuel her workout body obsession.

Helen hears the words You will not be okay until you make him pay, a message she attributes to God rather than steroid-induced psychosis. Helen wants to have her ex roughed up without doing serious damage. The gym rat connects her with Jerry, who enlists the help of his friend Bunny. Both guys need money, but this isn’t their typical line of work. They confront Helen’s ex in a park and are surprised when he fights back. Bunny comes to the defense of Jerry and does just enough damage to get himself arrested.

ATF Agents Howley and Gana visit Bunny in jail. They threaten him with a lengthy sentence but promise to help him avoid the consequences of his crimes if he’ll go undercover in their investigation of Bunny’s uncle. Bunny knows his Uncle Willard served some time for manslaughter but doesn’t know the details. He hasn’t seen Willard in years.

The ATF agents are vague about the nature of their investigation — they mention conspiracy and racketeering — but they tell Bunny that Willard is leading a Christian Identity group of white supremacists. Snitching on Willard doesn’t appeal to Bunny until they promise him a payment of $100 a day. Bunny’s lawyer should know better than to trust ATF agents but he tells Bunny to take the deal.

At ATF’s direction, Bunny takes a janitorial job with a used car dealer where his uncle makes occasional appearances, perhaps in connection with the used car dealer’s drug dealing.. Pretending to meet his uncle by chance, Bunny takes a job on his uncle’s ranch, where he sees young men training with firearms. He knows they are planning a major operation but the ATF agents only seem to be interested in recovering a notebook that Willard keeps in his safe. The novel’s second half follows Bunny’s effort to recover the notebook, his discovery of its purpose, and his hapless attempt to rip off Willard and foil the ATF agents.

Bunny and Jerry are affable losers, the kind of young men who have big dreams and little hope of achieving them. They don’t shy away from hard work but they are attracted to the possibility of easy money. It is in their nature to assume that attractive women are essentially good (a bad assumption to make if you’re a character in a crime novel). As earnest and uncomplicated dudes with reasonably good hearts, they easily win the reader’s sympathy. Helen is ambitious and petty, making her a good foil to the protagonists, but she’s likable in her own way.

The plot is a fun mixture of light and dark. The bad guys are evil but a bit bumbling. The novel’s violence is not particularly graphic although it features one of those "his head exploded in front of me" scenes that have become ubiquitous in crime stories. The story moves in unexpected directions as it nears the end -- it almost turns into a road novel -- but surprises are telegraphed by earlier events, so Patrick Hoffman plays fair with the reader. Early scenes that seem important to the story turn out to be relatively inconsequential while events that seem insignificant are important by the end.

The final bro bonding scene is a bit sappy and the conclusion is improbably happy. Those aren’t really complaints. The protagonists deserve a happy ending, so even if it stretches the boundaries of plausibility, I don’t care. Set against a disturbing backdrop of white straight male supremacy, a happy ending for decent people is a good way for the story to end.

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The Trouble Up North by Travis Mulhauser

Published by Grand Central Publishing on March 11, 2025

The Sawbrook family owns six hundred acres adjacent to Crooked Tree Park in Northern Michigan, but developers want their land. The Sawbrooks live on the edge of society and constantly fight with each other, but they aren’t dysfunctional. Within their limits, they function surprisingly well. The Sawbrooks are a crime family, but the crimes are low-key — brewing moonshine, smuggling cigarettes into Canada — and the Sawbrooks take pride in never being caught. Although they spend much of their time on the river, they are equally proud that no Sawbrook ever died by drowning.

Rhoda’s grandfather was “not well after the war,” a diagnosis that explains his decision to plant land mines in the woods to kill as many invaders as possible when they came for him. Rhoda’s father placed barbed wire around the mined land, although an occasional black bear tears down the fence and explodes while trying to snack on berries.

Rhoda’s husband is living with lung cancer. He would like to die but Rhoda can’t bear the thought of living without him. Their daughter Lucy is a park ranger. She's the only Sawbrook with an education and the only one who has any interest in obeying the law.

Rhoda gave equal parcels of the family land to her three children. Lucy sold her share to an environmental trust for $20,000 to keep it from being developed, causing Rhoda to complain that she gave it to communists — i.e., the conservation group that purchased the land.

Lucy paid her sister Jewell $20,000 so she could sell Jewell’s share of the land to the trust, but Jewell promptly lost the cash in a high-stakes poker game in Vegas, thwarting her hope of doubling her money and buying the land back. Lucy spent half the cash she received from the trust on treatment for her alcoholic brother Buckner. She regards that investment as a waste when Buckner goes off the wagon after hearing bad news about his stripper girlfriend.

Against that background, a story unfolds, although the plot is an excuse to explore the family dynamic. A man named Van Hargrave offers Jewell $10,000 (but only $1,000 up front) to set his boat on fire. Hargrave says he wants to collect the insurance. Hargrave runs poker games in his garage and promises to set up a game with high rollers that will allow Jewell to win more money than she lost in Vegas.

Jewell manages to burn the boat but the fire spreads to the forest. As Lucy evacuates campers from the park, she spots Jewell running through the woods and gives chase. They both end up in the river, creating the risk that one of them will be the first Sawbrook to drown — or to be captured after a crime. Buckner enters the mix by getting drunk and stealing an ATV from the park rangers. Lucy spots him as she’s chasing Jewell.

The Trouble Up North blends a crime story with a family drama. At the end, it becomes a story of enduring love. Travis Mulhauser crafts a fast-moving plot that will capture the reader’s attention, but characterization is the novel’s strength.

Buckner is a veteran but he doesn't blame war for his alcoholism. “Buckner had always been a drinker but it really picked up after he got back from Iraq, which people liked to say was because of trauma. Buckner had not been traumatized, but after a while he stopped arguing and just let people believe what they wanted.”

Buckner’s girlfriend has more depth than most fictional strippers. Her relationship with Rhoda showcases two capable women with soft hearts and hard attitudes. They aren’t afraid of bullies.

Lucy and Jewell are at odds through much of the novel. Lucy’s job is to enforce the law (at least within the park). Will Lucy notify the authorities that her sister started the fire? Someone may have died in the fire, so Lucy worries about her own criminal liability if she protects Jewell. Yet protecting each other is the drive that holds the Sawbrook clan together. How the mess the family members have made of their lives will be resolved is the question that gives the story its tension.

The story is tight. Like Chekov’s Gun, seemingly insignificant details become important later in the narrative. The resolution, like the story that precedes it, is smart and surprising. The Trouble Up North is an easy novel to recommend to fans of literary crime fiction.

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