In a literary equivalent of a highbrow slasher movie, a serial killer in the Twin Cities employs knives, guns, and, more inventively, a potato in a sock to attack, torture, rape, and murder his female victims and then leaves cryptic notes designed to tantalize the cops. Enter Minneapolis police lieutenant Lucas Davenport, who employs his own devious and not-quite-legal methods to investigate and solve the crime wave. Sandford, the alias of a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has some trouble with procedural details in his first novel, but he may be on to something with his hero: an offbeat tough-guy detective who is both hard-boiled and endearingly eccentric. Some readers may be put off by the detailed descriptions of each nauseatingly violent act, but Sandford definitely can write vivid prose of a kind that fans of blood-soaked thrillers will appreciate.

First-rate cat-and-mouse thriller – cop vs. serial killer – that's the fiction debut of a pseudonymous Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Games are the name of the game here, from the "rules" that self-styled "maddog" rapist/killer Louis Vullion, an attorney, leaves for the police (e.g., "Never kill anyone you know") after each of his Minneapolis kills to the lucrative computer war-games that tough hero-cop Lucas Davenport designs in his spare time. As a "player," Davenport sets out to catch Vullion by outwitting him – mostly by releasing false and infuriating information (for instance, that the cops think Vullion is impotent) through a dumb TV reporter who makes perfect cheese for the trap Davenport's setting. As Vullion and Davenport make their moves – the killer snuffing a young whore, then a cripple, and the cop mixing inspiration with dogged footwork and handling an overzealous media- – author Sandford colors in a deep background for each: the killer with his lonely, sterile house and nerdy ways, Davenport with his old friend who's a nun, his pregnant reporter-girlfriend, and his new flame, Carla Ruiz, who survived an aborted attack by Vullion. And if the action sometimes breaks into arrhythmia (a red herring about the false arrest of a suspect) or cliché, the action shifts into high gear when the cop's mousetrap snaps shut but misses the killer. Realizing he's been made, Vullion designs an elaborate vengeance-puzzle (the "stroke") that features Carla as the prize even as Davenport counters with a set-up (the "coup") to ice Vullion cold-bloodedly and with impunity. Neither as psychologically astute as Ridley Pearson's Undercurrents (1988) nor as flat-out terrifying as Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs (1988), but for ingenuity and sheer entertainment Sandford's first far outclasses most other recent serial-killer novels, marking him a thriller writer to watch.

Lieutenant Lucas Davenport, highly touted killer detective, invents intricate video games that he sells for cash. Called in to aid the Minneapolis team scrambling to stop a psychopathic serial woman-slayer, Lucas almost meets his match. The self-styled "mad dog" murderer views his rape/stabbings as a game as well, setting up obstacles for the police, carefully selecting his victims, and priding himself on clever moves. Despite his largely deja vu plot, debut novelist Sandford delivers tense action, chilling excitement, and thrilling suspense. Fast-moving prose and romantic sidelines add a little zest, too.

Making his fiction debut, "Sandford," a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist using a pseudonym, has taken a stock suspense plot – a dedicated cop pursuing an ingenious serial killer – and dressed it up into the kind of pulse-quickening, irresistibly readable thriller that many of the genre's best-known authors would be proud to call their own. A killer who calls himself the "maddog" has been murdering Minneapolis women, seemingly without pattern or motive. The crimes are linked only by their brutality and by the slayer's "signature": at each scene, he leaves a written rule of crime, such as "Never kill anyone you know," or "Never carry a weapon after it has been used." Into the case comes Lucas Davenport, a policeman with five kills in the line of duty, a surefire sense of how to handle the thirsty media and strong instincts about the killer's psyche. Sandford offers no mystery here; the killer's identity is revealed in the first pages, and the suspense comes in waiting for him or Davenport to slip up. Despite one or two beginner's mistakes (an overly obvious red herring, a character inconsistency), the author knows his territory well; the result is a police procedural as effective as it is brutal. The author's second thriller under his own name (John Camp) will be issued by Holt in September.