Book review: Neon Prey by John Sandford
Clayton Deese is a very bad man. He likes killing people and then he likes eating the corpse. He’s recently skipped out on bail. He’s teamed up with a group that makes a lot of money by breaking into rich people’s houses. And Lucas Davenport is on his trail, along with some of his usual group (Bob and Rae) but also some new people, because most of the action takes place in Las Vegas and in the surrounding desert.
Neon Prey has all the usual attributes of a Prey novel: Extreme violence, good relationships among the “good guys’’ (marshals, police officers, FBI agents) and a complicated plot. However, I was somewhat disappointed. I think there was too much switching of viewpoint and too many subsidiary characters and plots. The Prey novels work best when it’s Davenport (and allies) against a single bad guy — good vs. evil. But here, while Deese is as bad a person as could exist, the complications dull the tension that is necessary in a book like this.
I still liked it and I still finished it pretty quickly, but it’s far from Sandford’s best.
