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EXTREME PREY
by John Sanford
Putnam, April 2016
406 pages
$29.00
ISBN: 0399176055


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Lucas Davenport has, once again, managed to lose a job that had lost his interest. He's happily interfering with workers renovating his summer cabin when he gets a call from a campaign manager for the governor of Minnesota, who is in Iowa campaigning for the Democratic party presidential nomination. The governor doesn't expect to beat out the woman who's the front runner, but that's okay. He actually wants to become vice-president. That's why he's alarmed when a routine campaign moment gives him a bad feeling. A chubby white-haired woman shakes his hand and advises him to move politically toward the center so he'll be able to appeal to voters if something happens to the front-runner.

There's just something about that perfectly pleasant, perfectly ordinary Iowan that makes him nervous. And then there's her son, the one with distinctive gray eyes and a stare that suggests there's something broken inside.

Readers know well before the governor that Marlys Purdy is just as dangerous as the governor suspects. She's fed up with politics as usual. She figures that nothing will change if the front-runner is elected. She wants change, now. The governor is independently wealthy, not beholden to anyone, and he even grew up on a farm. She wants things to change and she's ready to step up and make it happen. Luckily, one of her sons learned enough in Iraq to provide the technical expertise. Her other son – well, what he doesn't know won't hurt him.

Sanford writes breezy books that are long but never ponderous. In other hands, this topical look at the violent potential of endemic anger in flyover country might go for deep significance, using political volatility as the fuse for a sizzling plot with a heavy-handed moral. Though the book moves at a smart clip, Sanford doesn't go there. Instead, he sends Lucas Davenport around rural Iowa (a place the author evokes with pitch-perfect dialogue) talking to folks about a threat that seems kind of outlandish. But just maybe . . .

The author passes up the opportunity to set his plot among hot-headed Republicans and vocal Tea Partiers and thus sidesteps taking political sides. Instead, his radicals are people who show their chickens at the county fair, look out for their neighbors, and don't raise their voices, all the while simmering inside about everything they feel they've lost. It's a sneaky way to take a look at the angry mood of the country during a particularly weird election year. What makes Marlys Purdy scary is that you might have just met her in the grocery store parking lot and had a pleasant chat about the weather without ever knowing that her anger has unhinged her.

§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.

Reviewed by Barbara Fister, April 2016

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