Lucas Davenport Books in Order: How to read the John Sandford’s Prey series?

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Lucas Davenport is the protagonist of the ‘Prey’ series written by John Sandford, a former American journalist and – obviously – author. Davenport worked as a detective with the Minneapolis Police Department in the first novels, then moved around changing assignments while tracking criminals of course.

He is wealthy, streetwise, has a wide network of contacts among all levels of society, and has a strong interest in reading, poetry, and war gaming. Although, he sometimes has to think like a criminal to stop them.

How To Read The Lucas Davenport Series in Order?

Every book in the Lucas Davenport series works as a standalone story, but the lives of the different characters evolve from one novel to the other.

  1. Rules of Prey – He left notes with every woman he killed. Rules of murder: Never have a motive. Never follow a discernible pattern. Never carry a weapon after it has been used… So many rules to his sick, violent games of death. But Lucas Davenport, the cop who’s out to get him, isn’t playing by the rules.
  2. Shadow Prey – Detective Lucas Davenport joins forces with NYPD detective Lucy Rothenburg to solve a series of grisly killings that have terrorized the country, from Minneapolis, to Oklahoma City, to New York following an enigmatic killer whose trail leads to a Native American embodiment of primal evil known as Shadow Love. Reissue.
  3. Eyes of Prey – Lieutenant Davenport’s sanity was nearly shattered by two murder investigations. Now he faces something worse … Two killers. One hideously scarred. The other strikingly handsome, a master manipulator fascinated with all aspects of death. The dark mirror of Davenport’s soul … This is the case that will bring Davenport back to life.
  4. Silent Prey – Dr. Mike Bekker, a psychotic pathologist, is back on the streets, doing what he does best? Murdering one helpless victim after another. Lucas Davenport knows he should have killed Bekker when he had the chance. Now he has a second opportunity? And the time to hesitate is through.
  5. Winter Prey – Called in to assist the sheriff from a remote, rural area of Wisconsin in his investigation into a brutal triple homicide, Lucas Davenport begins to uncover a shocking series of vicious crimes that stun even Davenport with their evil intent. Reissue.
  6. Night Prey – A savage psychopath is playing cat and mouse with Lucas Davenport. But both killer and detective find themselves at odds with a female investigator who has intensely personal reasons for catching the killer herself-and fast.
  1. Mind Prey – Lucas Davenport has met his match-a brilliant, wanton killer who knows more about mind games than Lucas himself. This man is more depraved and intelligent than anybody Lucas has tracked before-and with a female psychiatrist in his trap, he’s already one step ahead of Lucas…
  2. Sudden Prey – The crime spree should have ended when Lucas Davenport killed the female bank robber during the shoot-out. But it’s just beginning, because the woman’s husband isn’t about to let Lucas – or anyone he loves – escape retribution.
  3. Secret Prey – A wealthy banker is dead shot once in the chest during a hunting trip. There are many reasons for him to be killed and many people who would do the deed. But who did Lucas Davenport has an idea. But this routine murder investigation is about to turn into something different. A cat and mouse game with a killer who does not hesitate to take the fight to Lucas himself And those he loves.
  4. Certain Prey – Clara Rinker is twenty-eight, beautiful, charmingly southern – and the best hit woman in the business. She just goes about her business, collects her money, and goes home. Her latest hit sounds simple: a defense attorney wants a rival eliminated. No problem – until a witness survives. Clara usually knows how to deal with loose ends: cut them off, one by one, until they’re all gone. This time, there’s one loose end that’s hard to shake.
  5. Easy Prey – In life she was a high-profile model. In death she is the focus of a media firestorm that’s demanding action from Lucas Davenport. One of his own men is a suspect in her murder. But when a series of bizarre, seemingly unrelated slayings rock the city, Davenport suspects a connection that runs deeper than anyone had imagined – one that leads to an ingenious killer more ruthless than anyone had feared…
  6. Chosen Prey – Art history professor James Qatar’s hobby was taking secret photographs of women. At night when he was all alone he’d dream about them and indulge his fantasies. Then one day his fantasy went too far. Now it’s Qatar’s turn to become an obsession – of Davenport’s. And for both men there’s no turning back.
  1. Mortal Prey – Years ago, Lucas Davenport almost died at the hands of Clara Rinker, the best hit woman in the business. Now retired and living in Mexico, she nearly dies herself when a sniper kills her boyfriend, the son of a local drug lord, and while the boy’s father vows vengeance, Rinker knows something he doesn’t: The boy wasn’t the target-she was-and now she is going to have to disappear to find the killer herself. The FBI and DEA draft Davenport to help track her down.
  2. Naked Prey – Two people are found hanging naked from a tree in the woods of northern Minnesota. What makes the situation particularly sensitive is the bodies are of a black man and a white woman. Lynching is the word everyone’s trying not to say, but as Lucas Davenport begins to discover, the murders are not at all what they appear to be.
  3. Hidden Prey – Theories abound when a Russian gets himself killed on the shore of Lake Superior – shot with fifty-year-old bullets. But when it turns out he had very high government connections, Lucas Davenport gets the call. Well, Lucas and a mysterious Russian cop with secrets all her own. Together, they’ll follow a trail back to another place and another time, and battle the shadows they discover there – shadows that turn out to be both very real and very deadly.
  4. Broken Prey – The first body is of a young woman, found on a Minneapolis riverbank, her throat cut, her body scourged and put on display. Whoever did this, Lucas Davenport knows, is pushed by brain chemistry. The second body is found three weeks later. Same condition, same display – except this time it is a man. Nothing to link the two victims, nothing to indicate that the killings end here.
  5. Invisible Prey – In a wealthy Minneapolis neighborhood, two elderly women are bludgeoned to death. They are apparent victims of a random robbery, though nothing of value appears to have been stolen. But when Lucas Davenport looks deeper, he fears that the victims weren’t so random, and the items stolen were far from invaluable. As a pattern emerges it leads Lucas to … certainly not where he expected.
  6. Phantom Prey – After one troubled college-age student disappears and two are found slashed to death, Lucas Davenport finds himself hunting what appears to be a modern-day Jack the Ripper. Unfortunately the clues aren’t adding up-and then there’s the young Goth girl who keeps appearing and disappearing. Where does she come from? Where does she go every night? And why does Lucas keep getting the sneaking suspicion that there is something else going on here?
  1. Wicked Prey – Out of Lucas Davenport’s past comes a psycho nursing a violent grudge. But why go after Davenport for revenge when Davenport’s young daughter is so close-and so vulnerable?
  2. Storm Prey – 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 then things swiftly go wrong, one of the workers dies, and the robbers hustle out to their truck–and find themselves for just one second face-to-face with a blond woman in the garage: Weather Karkinnen, surgeon, wife of an investigator named Lucas Davenport.
  3. Buried Prey – For twenty-five years the unsolved kidnapping of two young girls has haunted Minneapolis homicide detective Lucas Davenport. Today, the bodies have been found. Today, he returns to a crime – and a nightmare – darker than any before.
  4. Stolen Prey – Lucas Davenport has seen many terrible murder scenes. This is one of the worst. In the Minnesota town of Wayzata, an entire family has been killed – husband, wife, two kids, dogs. On the wall, in blood: ‘Were coming.’ No apostrophe.
  5. Silken Prey – All hell has broken loose in the capital. An influential state senator has been caught with something very nasty on his office computer. The governor can’t believe it. Something’s not right. As Davenport investigates, the trail leads to a political fixer who has disappeared, then to the Minneapolis police department itself, and most unsettling of all, to a woman who could give Machiavelli lessons in manipulation.
  6. Field of Prey – When a county deputy is called out to an abandoned farmhouse in the cornfields of Minnesota by a couple of terrified teenagers, he finds that a body has been stuffed down a cistern. And then another, and another. By the time Lucas Davenport is called in, the police are up to fifteen bodies, and counting. And when Lucas begins to investigate, he makes some disturbing discoveries of his own.
  1. Gathering Prey – They call them Travelers. They drift from city to city, always staying on the move. Now somebody is murdering them, one by one. When Lucas Davenport’s adopted daughter, Letty, gets a phone call from a female Traveler she’d befriended in San Francisco, Letty urges her father to investigate.
  2. Extreme Prey – After the events in Gathering Prey, Lucas Davenport finds himself in a very unusual situation – no longer employed by the Minnesota BCA. His friend the governor is just cranking up a presidential campaign, though, and he invites Lucas to come along as part of his campaign staff. ‘Should be fun!’ he says, and it kind of is – until they find they have a shadow: an armed man intent on killing the governor … and anyone who gets in the way.
  3. Golden Prey – Thanks to some very influential people whose lives he saved, Lucas is no longer working for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, but for the U.S. Marshals Service, and with unusual scope. He gets to pick his own cases, wherever they lead him. And where they’ve led him this time is into real trouble. A Biloxi, Mississippi, drug-cartel counting house gets robbed, and suitcases full of cash disappears, leaving behind five bodies, including that of a six-year-old girl.
  4. Twisted Prey – A rich psychopath, Taryn Grant had run successfully for the U.S. Senate, where Lucas had predicted she’d fit right in. He was also convinced that she’d been responsible for three murders, though he’d never been able to prove it. Once a psychopath had gotten that kind of rush, though, he or she often needed another fix, so he figured he might be seeing her again.
  5. Neon Prey – Clayton Deese looks like a small-time criminal. Deese has skipped out on bail, and the U.S. Marshals come looking for him. It’s his boss they want, but Deese might be their best chance to bring down the whole operation. Then, they step onto a dirt trail behind Deese’s rural Louisiana cabin and find a jungle full of graves. Now, Lucas Davenport is on the trail of a serial killer who has been operating for years without notice. His quarry is ruthless, and full of surprises…
  6. Masked Prey – The daughter of a U.S. Senator is monitoring her social media presence when she finds a picture of herself on a strange blog. And there are other pictures . . . of the children of other influential Washington politicians, walking or standing outside their schools, each identified by name. It’s obviously alarming. With nowhere else to turn, influential Senators decide to call in someone who can operate outside the FBI’s constraints: Lucas Davenport.
  1. Ocean Prey (feat. Virgil Flowers) – An off-duty Coast Guardsman is fishing with his family when he calls in some suspicious behavior from a nearby boat. It’s a snazzy craft, slick and outfitted with extra horsepower, and is zipping along until it slows to pick up a surfaced diver . . . a diver who was apparently alone, without his own boat, in the middle of the ocean. None of it makes sense unless there’s something hinky going on, and his hunch is proved right when all three Guardsmen who come out to investigate are shot and killed.
  2. Righteous Prey (feat. Virgil Flowers) – “We’re going to murder people who need to be murdered.” 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 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. After The Five strike again in the Twin Cities, Virgil Flowers and Lucas Davenport are sent in to investigate.
  3. Judgment Prey (feat. Virgil Flowers) – The ferocity of the killings, which occur at the home of federal judge Alex Sand and his two young kids, sends their affluent St. Paul neighborhood into shock. There are plenty of those out to get the judge, but the failure of a significant contribution he had planned to make to charity further complicates matters, putting the funds in limbo and focusing attention on his distraught widow. It doesn’t take long for Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers to be contacted as public pressure grows and both the neighborhood police department and the FBI encounter several roadblocks. The pair is committed to investigating every lead and every idea until they discover who killed the Sands. However, as they come up against the most improbable of forces, they start to question whether each detour could actually bring them closer to the truth.

Reading The Letty Davenport Books in Order

In 2022, John Sandford starts publishing a spin-off series about Letty Davenport, the brilliant and tenacious adopted daughter of Lucas Davenport.

  1. The Investigator – By age twenty-four, Letty Davenport has seen more action and uncovered more secrets than many law enforcement professionals. Now a recent Stanford grad with a master’s in economics, she’s restless and bored in a desk job for U.S. Senator Colles. Letty’s ready to quit, but her skills have impressed Colles, and he offers her a carrot: feet-on-the-ground investigative work, in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security. Several oil companies in Texas have reported thefts of crude, Colles tells her. He isn’t so much concerned with the oil as he is with the money: who is selling the oil, and what are they doing with the profits?
  2. Dark Angel – Letty Davenport’s days working a desk job are behind her. Her previous actions at a gunfight in Texas-and her incredible skills with firearms-draw the attention of several branches of the US government, and make her a perfect fit for even more dangerous work. The Department of Homeland Security and the NSA have tasked her with infiltrating a hacker group, known only as Ordinary People, that is intent on wreaking havoc. Letty and her reluctant partner from the NSA pose as free-spirited programmers for hire and embark on a cross-country road trip to the group’s California headquarters.

If you like our article about the Alvirah and Willy series in order, don’t forget to bookmark it!

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