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First Published:
May 1998, 392 pages
Paperback:
Jun 1999, 384 pages
Everybody has his secrets. But some of them will get you killed - this time John Sandford surpasses himself.
Everybody has his secrets. But some of them will get you killed. John Sandford has long been praised as "one of the most gifted thriller writers at work in this country or any other" (Richmond-Times Dispatch)--but this time he surpasses himself.
The company chairman lay on the cold ground of the woods, his eyes unseeing, his orange hunting jacket punctured by a rifle bullet at close range. Around him stood the four executives with whom he had been hunting, each with his or her own complicated agenda, each with a reason not to be sorrowful about the man's death. If he read it in a book, Lucas Davenport thought, it would seem like one of those classic murder mysteries, the kind where the detective gathers everyone together at the end and solves the case with a little speech.
But it wasn't going to be that easy, he knew. There were currents running through this group, hints and whispers of something much greater than the murder of a single man. He had felt this way not long before, sensed the curling of an indefinable evil, and not only had it nearly gotten him killed, it had lost him his fiancée, who'd never been able to recover from the violence of the encounter. Sometime soon, unless he could stop it, there would be another death, and then still another, and Davenport couldn't help but wonder if maybe this time, the final death might not be his own. . . .
John Sandford has written extraordinary thrillers before, but nothing to top the startling twists and unrelenting suspense of Secret Prey.
Chapter One
THE CHAIRMAN 0F the board pulled the door shut behind him, stacked his rifle against the log-sided cabin, and walked down to the end of the porch. The light from the kitchen window punched out into the early-morning darkness and the utter silence of the woods. Two weeks of nightly frost had killed the insects and had driven the amphibians into hibernation: for a few seconds, he was alone.
Then the chairman yawned and unzipped his bib overalls, unbuttoned his pants, shuffled his feet, the porch boards creaking under his insulated hunting boots, Nothing like a good leak to start the day, he thought. As he leaned over the low porch rail, he heard the door opening behind him. He paid no attention.
Three men and a woman filed out of the house, pretended not to notice him.
"Need some snow," the woman said, peering into the dark. Susan O'Dell was a slender forty, with a tanned, dry face, steady brown eyes, and smile lines around her mouth. A headlamp was strapped ...
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