MIND PREY

Sandford's talent for conveying the quotidian horrors, tedium, and heavy-handed humor of urban police procedure is as sure as ever in streetwise hero Lucas Davenport's seventh outing (Night Prey, 1994, etc.). Andi Manette, a carriage-trade psychiatrist, and her two young daughters are the victims of a violent daylight abduction. Because Manette is the daughter of an influential Minnesota poi and the estranged wife of a wealthy developer, Davenport, deputy chief of the Minneapolis PD, winds up in charge of the high-profile case. The kidnapper, a vicious but resourceful psychopath named John Mail, was once a patient of Manette's while confined in a state institution for the criminally insane. Before the abductor's identity becomes apparent, however, Davenport needs to check out several suspects who might stand to gain from Manette's death. A computer-game freak, Mail soon begins phoning Davenport (an off-duty entrepreneur who launched his own simulation software company) to taunt him with clues. The detective eventually realizes his quarry is getting inside information from someone in Manette's family circle, which includes her partner — a nasty piece of work who has been bedding down with the septuagenarian paterfamilias. The suspense and dread build steadily as Davenport closes in on Mail, who has been beating and raping Manette in a farmhouse well beyond the Twin Cities limits. Will Davenport (who's been lured into a couple of near-fatal traps by his crafty adversary) be able to engineer an endgame before the madman kills his three captives? And what can Manette and her children do to help save themselves from mortal peril? A shocking but credible climax provides most of the answers, and Davenport ties up the last loose ends in a satisfying postlude. Nonstop action, an offbeat milieu (the wide, weird world of computer gamesters), and a host of three-dimensional characters — all make for one of the best Preys yet.