Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Group Putnam for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
Letty Davenport just got called in to the Senator’s office again – that’s never good. A British doctor has gone missing on American soil. On it’s own, that’s not too worrisome. However, Doctor Scott is an expert in infectious diseases and some of his research has negative implications in a world where simple diseases could be transformed into weapons of mass destruction. After the events in Texas and California over the past year, Letty’s gotten a reputation for solving dangerous situations like this, but opts to bring in her dad Lucas Davenport and his partner from the Marshall’s Service. This is one of the first times Letty and Lucas will get to work together and it will definitely be memorable!
Toxic Prey makes the 34th book in the Lucas Davenport series from John Sandford and the third in the Letty Davenport series. Sandford delivers the snarky conversations and law enforcement procedurals readers have come to love from his writing. This book delivers some of our biggest public fears in the pages – highly contagious diseases, weaponized and mutated for maximum damage, and criminals, skilled in the medical field, with no qualms about wreaking havoc on the innocent public. This is a book about the power of observation and how easy it might be for a repeat of COVID if the right players had the right tools.
I give Toxic Prey 5 out of 5 stars. I have been a fan of John Sandford’s since I read the first Letty Davenport novel. The only holdback I have is around the death of children late in the novel. Not to give away too much, but I typically don’t do well when children are harmed in a story. However, Sandford handles this aspect of the story in a way that wasn’t as traumatizing as I’ve seen in other books – readers don’t build a connection with the children ahead of the incident. I enjoyed getting to know Lucas Davenport’s character through the frame of his daughter in this novel. I do wish I knew more about his back story, but can fix that soon as I read through the earlier novels in the series.
If you are a fan of Sandford’s work, you will not be disappointed with this latest release! With inclusion of sex, death, and violence, I would recommend this book be directed to more mature audiences over 16. And while this is a book later in a series, it can be read as a standalone novel with minimal knowledge loss to the reader. Also, if you like works by writers like Marc Cameron or Michael Connelly, you will love this series, too!
This is another book I requested to review based on the previous books in the series – I loved the first two Letty Davenport novels so much, I had to read the third! I was not disappointed! And because I loved the three in this series so much, I am working on acquiring the entire Lucas Davenport series, too!
Toxic Prey will release April 9th – just in time for Spring Break. You can pre-order your copy today on our Bookshop.org page!
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