Lucas Davenport investigates an unsettling series of murders in this classic novel in the #1  New York Times  bestselling series—and this one is John Sandford “at the top of his game” ( New York Post )…   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... FEATURING A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR Praise for Easy Prey “The dialogue is deft, the melodrama masterfully orchestrated and the conclusion truly culminant. As secrets explode, as bullets fly and bodies fall, and as the ground keeps shifting, there’s hardly time to keep up with the spectacle.”— The Los Angeles Times “When you come out of the twists and turns that are  Easy Prey , it is a marvel how [Sandford] could do this...he’s a writer in control of his craft.”— Chicago Sun-Times “Crackerjack suspense...[Sandford’s] at the top of his game again with  Easy Prey .” —New York Post “A Grand Guignol of a climax.”— Kirkus Reviews “Wildly successful...contains all the elements fans have come to expect: solid plot, gallows humor...sex, and the likeable, self-assured Davenport.”— Booklist “Rapid-fire action...sharply evocative.”— Minneapolis Star Tribune “ Easy Prey  is hard to put down.”— Richmond Times Dispatch “[An] ever-entertaining series. As always, it’s a joy to follow this rare cop who gets led more often by his gut instinct than by clues. His humor, understated and perverse, can be wildly funny, and the people he runs across are shrewdly conceived originals.”— Publishers Weekly John Sandford  is the pseudonym for Pulitzer Prize – winning journalist John Camp. He is the #1 New York Times  bestselling author of the Prey series featuring Lucas Davenport, the Kidd series, the Virgil Flowers series, three YA novels coauthored with his wife, Michele Cook, and three other books, most recently  Saturn Run . one WHEN THE FIRST MAN WOKE UP THAT MORNing, he wasn’t thinking about killing anyone. He woke up with a head full of blues, a brain that was too big for his skull, and a bladder about to burst. He lay with his eyes closed, breathing across a tongue that tasted like burnt chicken feathers. The blues rolled in through the bedroom door. Coming down hard. He had been flying on cocaine for three days, getting everything done, everything. Then last night, coming down, he’d stopped at a liquor store for a bottle of Stolichnaya. His bleeding brain retained a picture of himself lifting the bottle off the shelf, and another picture of an argument with the counterman, who didn’t want to break a hundred-dollar bill. By that time, the coke high had become unsustainable; and the Stoli had been a bad idea. There was no smooth landing after a three-day toot, but the vodka turned a wheels-up belly landing into a full crash-and-burn. Now he’d pay. If you peeled open his skull and dumped it, he thought, his brain would look like a coagulated lump of Campbell’s bean soup. He cracked his eyes, lifted his head, and looked at the clock. A few minutes past seven. He’d gotten four hours of sleep. Par for the course with coke, and the Stoli hadn’t helped. If he’d stayed down for ten hours, or twelve—he needed about sixteen to catch up—he might have been past the worst of it. Now he was just gonna have to suck it up. He turned to his left, where a woman, a dishwater blonde, lay facedown in her pillow. He could only see about half of her head; the rest was buried by a red fleece blanket. She lay without moving, like a dead woman—but no such luck. He closed his eyes again, and there was nothing left in the world but the blues music bumping in from the next room, from the all-blues channel, nine-hundred-and-something on the TV dial. Must’ve left it on last night. . . . Gotta move, he thought. Gotta pee. Gotta take twenty aspirins and go down to Country Kitchen and get some pancakes and link sausages. . . . The man didn’t wake up thinking about murder. He woke up thinking about his head and his bladder and a stack of pancakes. Funny how things work out. That night, when he killed two people, he was a little shocked. - Green-eyed Alie’e Maison stood in the hulk of a rust-colored Mississippi River barge. She was wrapped in a designer dress that looked like froth over a reef in the Caribbean Sea—an ankle-length dress the exact faded-jade color of her eyes, low-cut and sheer, hugging her hips, flaring at her ankles. She was large-eyed, barefoot, elfin, fleeing down a pale yellow two-by-twelve-inch pine plank, which stretched like a line of fire out of the purple gloom of the barge’s interior. Behind her, a huge man in a sleeveless white T-shirt, filthy Sears work pants, and ten-inch work boots blew sparks off a piece o