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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
May 1999, 339 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2000, 368 pages
Davenport confronts an entirely new kind of adversary. Her name is Clara Rinker, a Southern woman, trim, pleasant, attractive - and the best hit-woman in the business.
"You know life is good when you have a new Lucas Davenport thriller to escape into," said The Chicago Tribune of Secret Prey, and everyone agreed that it was one of Sandford's very best. "Enthralling ... Everything works," said USA Today. "Sandford is at the top of his game," agreed the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Now Davenport confronts an entirely new kind of adversary. Her name is Clara Rinker, a Southern woman, trim, pleasant, attractive--and the best hit-woman in the business. She isn't showy, not one of those movie killers; she just goes quietly about her business, collects her money and goes home.
It's when she's hired for a job in Minnesota that things become complicated for her. A defense attorney wants a rival eliminated, and that's fine. But then a witness survives, the attorney starts acting weird, this big cop Davenport gets on her case, and loose ends begin popping up faster than a sweater unraveling. Clara hates loose ends, and knows of only one way to deal with them: You start cutting them off, one after the other, until they're all gone.
Lucas thinks the case is worrisome enough, but he has no idea of the toll it is about to take on him. For of all the criminals he has hunted during his life, none has been as efficient or as ferociously intelligent as the one who is about to start hunting him--and none knows so well what his weak spots are…and how to penetrate them.
Filled with the brilliant characters and exceptional drama that have been his trademarks, Certain Prey is John Sandford's most suspenseful novel yet--the author once again "at the top of his game."
Clara Rinker
Of the three unluckiest days in Barbara Allen's life, the first was the day Clara Rinker was raped behind a St. Louis nudie bar called Zanadu, which was located west of the city in a dusty checkerboard of truck terminals, warehouses and light assembly plants. Zanadu, as its chrome-yellow I-70 billboard proclaimed, was E-Z On, E-Z Off. The same was not true of Clara Rinker, despite what Zanadu's customers thought.
Rinker was sixteen when she was raped, a small athletic girl, a dancer, an Ozarks runaway. She had bottle-blond hair that showed darker roots, and a body that looked wonderful in V-necked, red-polka-dotted, thin cotton dresses from Kmart. A body that drew the attention of cowboys, truckers and other men who dreamt of Nashville.
Rinker had taken up nude dancing because she could. It was that, fuck for money or go hungry. The rape took place at two o'clock in the morning on an otherwise delightful April night, the kind of night when ...
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