VJ Books has received: Stephen J. Cannell – The Prostitute’s Ball, Jonathan Franzen – Freedom, F. Paul Wilson – Fatal Error, John Sandford – Bad Blood, Charles Kipps – Crystal Death, Jeffrey Archer – And Thereby Hangs A Tale, and Payne Harrison – Eurostorm.
Tualatin, Oregon – September 1, 2010 – VJ Books (http://www.vjbooks.com) honors bestselling thriller writer John Sandford as September 2010 Favorite Author.
John Sandford was born John Camp on February 23, 1944, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He attended the public schools in Cedar Rapids. In 1966, Sandford graduated from the University of Iowa with a bachelor’s degree in American Studies. John Sandford is widely recognized for his Prey novel series featuring Lucas Davenport. Sandford has written more than 30 fiction novels and two non-fiction books.
The Washington Post says that “John Sandford is at the top of his game”.
“In addition to the twenty novels featuring Lucas Davenport, he has written four in the Kidd series (two as Camp, two as Sandford), two showing us the razor-edge world of the Night Crew, and more recently four books featuring Virgil Flowers, a gun-totin’ cop who looks, dresses, and acts a lot more like a road-weary drifter than your stereotypical bullet-headed badge-wearer” says John Hutchinson of VJ Books. “John Sandford has been writing brilliantly suspenseful, consistently surprising thrillers filled with rich characters and exceptional drama since 1989, three years after winning the Pulitzer Prize as a features reporter for the Pioneer Press in St. Paul.”
Sandford’s latest novel, Bad Blood, is filled with the brilliant plotting and compulsively readable prose that are John Sandford’s hallmarks. Bad Blood is another masterpiece by one of our very best suspense writers.
A chronological list of John Sandford books and series is shown below.
The Prey Series: Rules of Prey (1989), Shadow Prey (1990), Eyes of Prey (1991), Silent Prey (1992), Winter Prey (1993), Night Prey (1994), Mind Prey (1995), Sudden Prey (1996), Secret Prey (1998), Certain Prey (1999), Easy Prey (2000), Chosen Prey (2001), Mortal Prey (2002), Naked Prey (2003), Hidden Prey (2004), Broken Prey (2005), Invisible Prey (2007), Phantom Prey (2008), Wicked Prey (2009), Storm Prey (2010)
The Virgil Flowers Series: Dark of the Moon (2007), Heat Lightning (2008), Rough Country (2009), Bad Blood (September 2010: Putnam)
The Kidd Series: The Fool’s Run (1989), The Empress File (1991), The Devil’s Code (2000), The Hanged Man’s Song (2003)
Standalone Novels: Dead Watch (2006), The Night Crew (1997)
One late fall Sunday in southern Minnesota, a farmer brings a load of soybeans to a local grain elevator- and a young man hits him on the head with a steel bar, drops him into the grain bin, waits until he’s sure he’s dead, and then calls the sheriff to report the “accident.” Suspicious, the sheriff calls in Virgil Flowers, who quickly breaks the kid down…and the next day the boy’s found hanging in his cell.
In Storm Prey, 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 then things swiftly go bad, 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.
Did she see enough? Can she identify them? Gnawing it over later, it seems to them there is only one thing they can do: Find out who she is, and eliminate the only possible witness… (more…)
A May 10 front page feature in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Arts section noted John Sandford’s varied tastes and interests: “His…passions range from art and photography to golf and hunting. He funds a $150,000-a-year archaeological dig in Israel. A former military man, he also recently reported on Iraq for Parade magazine.” The author kicked off his Wicked Prey tour (copies in print: 383,770) with SRO events in the Twin Cities, as well as talks and signings in Phoenix, San Diego, Chicago, Milwaukee and Los Angeles.
Order your signed copy of Wicked Prey by John Sandford at www.vjbooks.com
(Publisher’s Weekly, May 25)
“Something wrong here, a cold whisper of evil. The house was a modernist relic, glass and stone and redwood, sixty years old and gone creaky; not all haunted house were Victorian. Sometimes at night… she’d feel a sudden coolness, as though somebody, or some thing, had just slipped by. This was different. She couldn’t pin it down, but it was palpable. She thought about stepping back into the garage. ‘Who’s there?’ she called. She got nothing back but an echo.”
(Opening lines of Phantom Prey. John Sandford’s Wicked Prey published May 12)
See signed John Sandford titles at www.vjbooks.com
(Publisher’s Weekly, Mar 30)
The 2008 Republican convention serves as the backdrop for bestseller Sandford’s amped-up, ultra-violent 19th thriller to feature Lucas Davenport of the Minneapolis Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (after Phantom Prey). An assassination plot aimed at John McCain turns out to be just a sidebar to another criminal operation—extremely slick thieves have come to the twin cities to rob Republican political operatives loaded down with millions of dollars of “street money,” illegal handouts for low-level campaign workers. Mastermind Rosie Cruz handles the gang’s complicated planning, while gangster Brutus Cohn does the robbery and killing aided by a couple of lesser thugs. A subplot involving Davenport’s teenage ward, Letty West, who’s provided interesting complications in the series, establishes her as a brave and intrepid investigator. A slam-bang shootout climax proves that Davenport still has what it takes when it comes to guts and gunplay. 500,000 first printing; author tour. (May)
Order your signed copy of Wicked Prey by John Sandford from www.vjbooks.com
John Sandford‘s Dark of the Moon made Publisher’s Weekly #2 on the Paperback Bestsellers / Mass Market list (Oct. 20).
Their review: “Unlike the harder-edged Prey series, Moon is more of an entertainment, allowing Flowers to supplement his determed quest for justice with witty conversation and several romantic interludes. . . But when the action demands it-such as the grim opening murder scene or the suspenseful storming of the cult leader’s encampment-Conger’s voice takes on a properly hard-boiled intensity.”