After a woman is murdered in the Twin Cities, Virgil Flowers and Lucas Davenport are sent in to investigate. And they soon have their hands full — the killings are smart and carefully choreographed, and with no apparent direct connection to the victims, The Five are virtually untraceable. But if anyone can destroy this group, it will be the dynamic team of Davenport and Flowers. This time, there's a storm brewing...Very early, 4:45, on a bitterly cold Minnesota morning, three big men burst through the door of a hospital pharmacy, duct-tape the hands, feet, mouth, and eyes of two pharmacy workers, and clean the place out. But... A group of Bitcoin billionaires calling themselves The Five have appointed themselves to clean up America by personally killing people they think are ruining the country. Their first victims include a violent street criminal, a corrupt right wing congressman, and a rich woman who made herself richer by putting people out of work. I confess, I've been a John Sandford fan for years. I've enjoyed all his books, especially the Prey and Virgil Flowers series. Again in this book, Sandford wove Virgil into a Prey story with excellent results. While the murderers seem to well plan and meticulously carry out each murder with an eye for escaping identification, the person who killed Sikes made an uncharacteristic mistake, which through good police work, Davenport and Flowers uncover. That leads to the man’s identity. Eventually, thanks mostly to the efforts of Davenport and Flowers, the FBI accumulates enough evidence to arrest Sike’s killer and hopes they can pressure him into giving up his accomplices. But when he makes bail, someone murders him and he is only the first of The Five who becomes a murder victim in this complex plot. The good guys wonder if someone is cleaning up loose ends. The case takes Davenport and Flowers from coast to coast, along with points in between.

Righteous Prey (Prey, book 32) by John Sandford

Sandford story is told throughout from the point of view of both the chasers and the chased. The result is that it feels like we, the reader, are often a step ahead of the law enforcement agencies as the action plays out. We want to know about the Five and their targets. And Lucas and Virgil? Well, their interactions are sarcastically witty at times. They look out for each other and put themselves in precarious positions to get the bad guys. They work well together and really like each other, something you would expect from law enforcement officers with a history of solving crimes.

In 1978, he left the Herald to work as a reporter and columnist at St. Paul Pioneer Press, a job he stayed in for twelve years. In Righteous Prey, Sandford does a very good job of showing how even the best intentions/politics can be twisted by psychopathy into something deadly. The group of vigilantes at the heart of the novel are a bunch of bored, wealthy self-identifying “lefties”— sort of. It’s “left” in a very American way, in that they are against much of what the Republicans are for (guns, in particular). However, each of them is clearly messed up in their own ways, and decide to take it upon themselves to use that which they oppose to make their political points. It’s an intriguing premise, and one that Sandford pulls off rather well. It also takes us into the world of bitcoin millionaires — Sandford’s always been good at tapping into something contemporary that’s making waves/news, and injecting it into his novels in some way, while also passing comment on it. Law enforcement powers-that-be are flummoxed until there's a No. 2 and a No. 3, pretty much cementing the notion that this pattern will continue unless someone puts a stop to it. Enter Lucas, a U.S. Marshal living in frigid Minnesota with his surgeon wife Weather, and Virgil, an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, who leaves partner Frankie and their twins at home). For the most part, they and the rest of the investigative team are pretty much flying blind; the killers leave no trace, so connecting any of them to a potential killer seems impossible. Vivian Zhao has an idea. She knows five like-minded bored Bitcoin billionaires who need excitement in their lives; something like, say, killing a person who they feel needs to be murdered. Communicating with each other on the dark net and known to each other only by their airport identifiers, each identifies a person they deem fit for death. As they begin their killing spree, Zhao puts out press releases celebrating The Five and their deeds, not only killing unsavory people, but also donating untraceable Bitcoin donations to various charities.

The Complete List of John Sandford Books in Order

The novel has a very good conclusion, but one that leaves the door open for a directly-connected follow-up (something Sandford has done a few times over the course of this series, but is not the norm). I’m certainly looking forward to that book, whenever it happens to surface. Lucas Davenport investigates a vitriolic blog that seems to be targeting the children of U.S. politicians in the latest thriller by #1 New York Times-bestselling author John Sandford. Many thanks to G.P. Putnam's Sons and to NetGalley, for the opportunity to read and review an early copy of Righteous Prey. So begins a press release from a mysterious group known only as “The Five,” shortly after a vicious predator is murdered in San Francisco. The Five is made up of vigilante killers who are very bored…and very rich. They target the worst of society—rapists, murderers, and thieves—and then use their unlimited resources to offset the damage done by those who they’ve killed, donating untraceable Bitcoin to charities and victims via the dark net. The Five soon become popular figures in the media …though their motives may not be entirely pure.

Danger stalks Lucas Davenport at work and all too close to home, in the superlative new thriller by the #1 New York Times-bestselling author. Righteous Prey by John Sandford, the pen name for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp, is the thirty-second book in the Prey novels series featuring Lucas Davenport. Besides the Prey novels, Sandford is the author of the Kidd novels, the Virgil Flowers novels, and six other books.