Maybe the least strong feature of Sandford's writing is the depth with which he represents his characters. Yet by reading the series in order, this isn't as much as a problem as it would be for a standalone work. From book to book, characters, especially Lucas, become more familiar as they develop and progress. For this reason and others I strongly recommend these books be read in sequence.
Still, this book, more than Silent Prey, works on its own. While I give it the highest rating, five stars, as part of the series, by itself it's still worth four.
My beef with the book was his treatment of the man in the wheelchair and the teacher at the vocational school. Davenport and a Milwaulkee cop enter the home of the wheelchair man, and he admits to producing the child porn magazine, and sending it to a printing teacher at the vocational school. He then shows them a closet stacked full of each issue he's produced. Where I'm from (a few hours drive from wisconsin), that is a serious felonly, with serious penalties, and the cops would jack the jail up and throw these guys underneath it in real life. Sanford portrays the cops as semi-tolerant of this activity, similiar to the way a cop may question a prostitute, and threaten to take her in, but really doesn't want to because it's not that major a crime. That doesn't seem true to life at all. In most or all areas of the US, mere posession of child porn is very serious, and manufacture and distribution is treated even more harshly. These guys would have been charged with several felony counts right away.
