by Rick Steelhammer

Charleston Gazette

May 11, 2003

In Naked Prey, released this month by G.P. Putnam's Sons, Davenport explores a side of a small-town [4]not likely to be found in a John Cougar Mellencamp song.

Davenport, now the chief troubleshooter for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety [5], is summoned to a crime scene in tiny Broderick, Minn., where Custer County's sole black man is found hanging nude from a tree limb with his equally dead and bare white girlfriend.

As one local lawman put it, "Our cultural diversity just went back to zero."

Davenport quickly discerns that the double homicide is not the racially charged lynching it appears to be, and begins unraveling a complex web of deceit and criminal activity.

For a town that supports only one crappy diner, two bars and a convenience store deli run by a poetry-spouting counterman, Broderick has more than its share of crime: In addition to local police corruption and rural drug trafficking, there is a commune of ex-nuns whose border-crossing activities involve contraband of another kind, and an auto rebuild shop that merges the body parts of cheap Canadian clunkers with hot American cars to produce street-legal hybrids [6].

Davenport, while still the brusque, no-BS, rule-bending, macho investigator of previous Prey novels, seems a bit less over the top [7] than usual in Naked Prey. Maybe that's because he's married to Weather, his surgeon sweetheart of previous novels, and the father of a toddler son.

While Davenport may have mellowed, he still applies whatever muscle, intimidation and political string-pulling necessary to get to the truth. He and partner Del Capslock salt the dialogue with wry observations and witty comebacks as they solve one piece of the puzzle, only to find two more, until they can finally put them together and solve the crimes within a crime.

Sanford paints a vivid, if bleak, portrait of modern rural life in America's heartland:

The story takes place in the dead of winter on the frozen, pool-table-flat plains of northwestern Minnesota, where the per capita incidence of shattered dreams, damaged souls and dark hearts is at least as high as in any major metropolitan area.

John Sandford is the pen name of ex-reporter John Camp, who spent most of the '70s working at the Miami Herald, alongside fellow journalist/novelists Carl Hiaasen and Edna Buchanan, before moving to Minnesota, where he worked for the St. Paul Pioneer Press & Dispatch.

In 1986, he won a Pulitzer Prize for a series detailing the life of a Minnesota farm family facing the prospect of having to leave their land because of the nature of America's agricultural economy.

A few years after winning the Pulitzer, he sold his first novel, The Fool's Run [8], under his real name. Several months later, his first novel in the Prey series, Rules of Prey, was ready for publication. Since it was considered bad form for a single author to debut two novels simultaneously, he used the name John Sandford – Sandford being a family name on his grandfather's side [9] – to appear on the credits of his second novel.

Camp's experience with deadline pressure apparently served him well as a novelist. He produced one Prey novel each year from 1989 until 2003, skipping only 1997, when he substituted The Night Crew for another Prey book.

In addition to The Fool's Run, Camp has produced two additional novels under his own name [10], featuring painter/computer whiz/industrial spy Kidd.

Needless to say, his days as a journalist are behind him, although he does accept the occasional assignment that captures his fancy – leaving reporters with novelist aspirations green with envy.