It starts with a crime, yes, but the police are already on top of it [3]. They handle it, and it's messy, and that starts off the real plotline: one of revenge.

And really, that's all the bad guys want: revenge. Eye for an eye [4]. They don't have a deeper plan involving money, or power. Some of them don't even expect to get out of it alive, but they don't care. The revenge is more important.

And from the moment the revenge plan starts, the police know who's doing it. Oh, they don't have all the names, and they don't know where they're hiding — there has to be some element of detection in the book — but the who and the why is never in question. Everyone knows who, and everyone knows exactly why.

They just don't know what to do about it.

There is a principle in math (well, it affects everything in science, but the origin is in math) called emergent complexity. It's when you take simple things, and mix them together in simple ways, and the result can not be predicted, or accurately modeled, or even replicated reliably [5]. You have a simple system — just a few moving parts and a couple of rules describing their movement — but complex behavior emerges from it [6].

That's what's going on here: there's a simple plan, and it's made of simple parts: get revenge first, don't worry about secondary goals. But it goes wrong almost immediately, and other factors interfere, and complexity emerges from the system. Suddenly, nobody knows what's going to happen.

It's still direct — there aren't any b-story subplots of note in this book, no romantic entanglements, no quiet moments fishing, no iPod gift card to buy songs with. None of that. It starts with action, and it just keeps going. And, again, nobody knows where the action's going to end up [7]. It could even kill a major character.

It very nearly did.

Long time readers know that it doesn't happen. Hell, anyone who reads the back covers or the inside jacket text or the reviews or anything about the books knows that Weather is still around in book twelve, in book eighteen, in book twenty, book twenty-five... So while it's a spoiler to say that she doesn't die in this book, the spoiler is well outside the statute of limitations for such things [8].

But that doesn't make the problem go away. It can be summed up with three simple points:

But we expect that drama in fiction. If the main character is in a stable, loving, caring relationship, there's a sadistic tendency on the part of the reader to want something terrible to happen, just to shake things up. Otherwise, the relationship is just getting in the way of the story. And that point, as horrible as it might be, is true — you don't want anything to get in the way of the story [10].

That's why Weather is in the distant background in Night Prey, and why, while she's the focus of the b-plot in Mind Prey, she's not in the book for more than a few scenes. The relationship is not necessary for the story. But in this one, Weather is important, if only as a target for the bad guys. Lucas and Weather's relationship will therefore play a more important role, but it's still going to be stable. But since it's stable, it's boring.

Worse (the thinking goes), Lucas is no longer the lovable bad-boy rogue he used to be. He can't go out and "have fun" [11] because then he'd be unfaithful, and that's not acceptable. The presence of Weather mellowed him out, smoothed him out, and turned him into Decaf Davenport Lite [12]. Or at least, that's what some readers feel has happened.

The obvious solution is to kill her off. A lot of wives have been killed off in crime thrillers.

And that, really, is one of the reasons it didn't happen. The killing of wives (or of husbands, but it's more rare just because of the demographic breakdown of protagonists) is common. So much so that it's become a trope in fiction [13]. It's not that it's an unbelievable development in the book, or that it doesn't fit this kind of story. It's that it happens too much.

There's another problem with killing her off, and that's a matter of tone. If you look at the novel, there are only two places to get away with it: at the beginning, when the LaChaise gang is doing their run on targets, or at the end, in some kind of climactic showdown.

If Weather got killed in a climactic showdown, it ends the book on an amazingly down note. Lucas probably goes into a rage-and-grief fueled depression that lasts... well, forever, probably. Or he dies. Killing Weather at the end of the book would have the potential to end the series.

I'm not saying that it wouldn't make sense, or that it'd be written badly, but can you imagine the reader reaction if the author had done that? It would be a whole new level of insane.

Alternately, he could have killed off Weather at the beginning. That's a valid approach, and — aside from the problem of it being a cliché in crime fiction — it gives Lucas the drive to get the job done.

A little too much, in fact. If Weather gets killed early on, while the bad guys are still out there, Lucas could well go on a murderous rampage. That's a much darker turn of events, and while it wouldn't necessarily end the series, it would send it in a different direction. Lucas probably wouldn't be able to keep his position at the Minneapolis Police Department. He could go his own way, becoming a Jack Reacher -like character. He could go off somewhere far away and become a small-town cop in the country, drinking himself into a depression to forget. Or, again, the series could end.

Neither option appealed to the author, and he eventually decided on a compromise: Weather isn't killed, but she's so traumatized by the confrontation at the end of the book that she leaves. Readers don't even know this until the Secret Prey, and I got a lot of mail from confused fans who thought they'd somehow missed a book [14]. That gave Lucas the chance to be a loner again, to have a new romance again, to be the bad boy again, for at least a few more books.

Another aside regarding Weather: while her long-term survival is almost assured [15], her mere existence splits the fans such that they tend to fall into one of two camps:

One half (approximately) think that Weather is the best thing to happen to Lucas, and while they loved the bad boy Lucas of old, he's grown up, and it would be unrealistic for him to not grow up, and he's a better person now, and more believable, and there should be more sections dedicated to the wonderful loving family relationships between Lucas, Weather and Letty, Sam, and Gabrielle [16].

The other half of the fanbase basically want Weather to get hit by a train. Like, yesterday.

Neither group is going to get their wish. The relationship really can get in the way of the plot, and so it's off to the side as much as possible. But she's not going to get hit by a train, either. I apologize for any inconvenience.

And... it's high, I've got to admit that. It's still not the highest — Shadow Prey has held that title for more than thirty years now — but it takes second place. So what's going on here?

There are two things contributing, I believe. One is that there's one small section of one chapter — just a few lines of dialogue, really — in which the word "fuck" is used nine times. It's a bit of cop talk, and they're all in closed quarters and getting on each other's nerves, and it's grating but also funny, especially when there's a punchline later in the conversation that defuses the whole situation.

Still, that nine times over such a small space is unmatched density for the entire Prey series, and I think it sticks out in people's minds as being representative of the entire book when really it's just a statistical fluke [18].

The other contributing factor is, in its own way, a fun example of unexpected complexity, but in the sense of a chain of events that has unexpected results.

In the mid-90s, the author met an archaeologist in Israel who convinced him to get involved in Archaeology [19]. But the author had no training in archaeology, had no skills in digging, and had no experience with the equipment.

So he took some classes on surveying methods and skills at a Twin Cities technical college [20]. He was 53 at the time, and most of the students were in their late teens or early 20s. And they swore all the time.

And that swearing — and, I suspect, more than a few of the students' other traits — ended up in the book. Or at least it rubbed off enough that it influenced things.

But if you see the word "fuck" nine times on a single page (it's in the middle of chapter Fifteen, page 211 in the original US hardcover, page 263 in the new US paperback) you might get the impression that the entire book's like that. It's not.