Before we started reading “The Nine” I unsuccessfully tried to cram in one of my favorite guilty pleasures: “Wicked Prey,” the latest in a series of mysteries by a former Twin Cities journalist who writes under the name John Sandford.
The Prey series is one of two I picked up as a young teenager because my mom read them and they seemed grown up. My tastes have long since shifted, but, though you’ll never find me waxing nostaligic about another pre-teen fave, Mary Higgins Clark, you’ll always find me with a copy of the latest Prey book.
When I finished Jeffrey Toobin, I picked up Sandford. More than anything, I wanted to see what the hero, a former-cop-turned-state-agent named Lucas Davenport, was up to. The books rely a little too heavily on boilerplate mystery cliches, but the pace, both in the book and as you read it, is fast enough to keep you involved. The problem with the Prey books is that they’re all so similar, I tend to forget them almost as soon as I read them. I can’t really tell you where the last book’s narrative thread ran out, but I can tell you a lot about Davenport. There’s something about Davenport and the way he moves through the cities that makes me want to sign up for the Minneapolis police force, too.
I feel the same way about the other mystery series with a solid place on my own young adult shelf, the Kinsey Millhone novels by Sue Grafton. Millhone is a private investigator in a Santa Barbara-like fake town called Santa Teresa. More importantly, the book titles are in such a form — “A is for Alibi,” “B is for Burglar,” “C is for Corpse,” — that guessing what the next title would be was a favorite car game for my family when we were young kids. Coming up: “U is for Undertow.” We didn’t guess that one. Still waiting for news on the X. Xerox was really our best shot because x-ray seemed like cheating.
Because Grafton writes the books as if little time is passing in Millhone’s world between each one, it’s still the 80′s in Santa Teresa. And that makes the feeling that I’m revisiting my own past even stronger. Whatever I’m doing in my real life, I’m spending the end of the day or so it takes me to suck down one of these books scoping out properties on the southern California coastline so that I can get into my VW Rabbit and go become a private investigator. Not that I have a Rabbit. Or the skills to become an investigator.
SPOILER ALERT: You know what happens in “Wicked Prey?” Lucas Davenport catches the bad guys. Ah, the reassuring feeling of a predictable trip to a favorite place.
