CHOSEN PREY

Twelfth in Sandford’s wildly successful Deputy Chief Detective Lucas Davenport series (Certain Prey, 1999, etc.), all set in Minneapolis and many being New York Times #1 bellringers. (Sandford is the pen name for Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist John Camp.) Davenport drives a Porsche and dresses up to keep his car from blushing. His new nemesis is a historian, James Qatar, whose joy first is in secretly photographing naked women until he finds an even greater pleasure: the aesthetics of cool, clear strangulation, which Sandford describes in convulsively graphic prose. And the more Qatar kills, the wiser and more refined he becomes about it. But does Morris Ware, a pervert back out on the street with his Brownie, whose art book of photos, Little Woman on the Edge, about naked girls coming into puberty, have contact with Qatar?

Sandford’s legion of female readers may find this one hard to take. But spellbinding? You bet.