JOHN SANDFORD'S GOLDEN PREY

John Sandford's Lucas Davenport is one of the enduring action heroes of the crime genre, his books coming in somewhere between police procedurals and action thrillers, usually including elements of
both. Davenport himself is on the outside pretty unassuming, but reveals more and more hidden talents in each book. This is demonstrated perfectly in a very entertaining opening sequence that has nothing to do with the rest of the story, but establishes Davenport's skill, his investigative freedom (due to circumstances arising earlier in the series), and the demeanor that allows people to think they might take advantage.

Golden Prey deals with the robbery of a drug cartel counting house, down in Biloxi, Mississippi. Among the bodies left behind is a six-year old girl, whose grandfather was one of the counters. Davenport gets on the case, and is joined by a pair of FBI agents, while the cartel also has its people on the case, and are tracking Davenport's efforts by tapping into the police communications computers. It's not just Mark Zuckerberg who's a threat to world peace and privacy. The cartel's pair includes a woman whose specialty is torture, and as they track the thieves she gets her results from their relatives and friends, using power tools.

What makes the book work is the portrait of the criminals. Garvin Poole is the shooter who committed the robbery, a careful bad man who lives quietly in Dallas constructing custom guitars with his girlfriend Dora Box. Sturgis Darling is the planner, and lives an even more respectable life on a farm. Their organisation is formidable, and their no-nonsense approach to the business reminds one of the crews Parker set up in the Richard Stark novels, less the penchant for killing. Given the three different chases taking place, Sandford keeps it all moving--and ends it with the kind of action a Jack Reacher novel might offer, a full scale shootout around an art museum in a tiny Texas town, in which Darling suddenly turns into an action man.

By this time the cartel has set another pair of tracker/killers on the scent, and they wind up with Box and Kort, the power-tool specialist, in the RV. This is one of the best casts of characters I can remember, three sets of killers and a trio of cops, and their eccentricities keep the story moving as quickly as the action. Oddly enough, there's a sort of happy-ending finale, as Lucas and the FBI miss a few bits of the cash. But no one can be perfect. Although Lucas stretches the case, when he plays one of the FBI agents, a tall woman called Rae, in one on one basketball. She's played at the University of Connecticut, America's top women's basketball programme. Lucas played college hockey at the University of Minnesota. Not many hockey players good enough to play big-time college have a lot of cross-over time for hoops, and women players at the top level are pretty damn good. Lucas is older too, and though he has a strength advantage, I found following the game a bit Bobby Riggs. But that's the name of the game: Lucas may not be all-seeing, but he is almost all-conquering.

Golden Prey by John Sanford
Simon & Schuster, £8.99, ISBN 9781471177057

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)