Masked Prey

Informationen zum Autor John Sandford Klappentext Lucas Davenport tracks a prolific serial killer in this nail-biting #1 New York Times -bestseller from John Sandford. Clayton Deese looks like a small-time criminal, muscle for hire when his loan shark boss needs to teach someone a lesson. Now, seven months after a job that went south and landed him in jail, Deese has skipped out on bail, and the U.S. Marshals come looking for him. They don't much care about a low-level guy--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--as Davenport will come to find--full of surprises . . .

Autorentext
John Sandford is the pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp. He is the author of twenty-nine Prey novels; four Kidd novels; twelve Virgil Flowers novels; three YA novels coauthored with his wife, Michele Cook; and three other books.

Klappentext

Lucas Davenport tracks a prolific serial killer in this nail-biting #1 New York Times-bestseller from John Sandford.

Clayton Deese looks like a small-time criminal, muscle for hire when his loan shark boss needs to teach someone a lesson. Now, seven months after a job that went south and landed him in jail, Deese has skipped out on bail, and the U.S. Marshals come looking for him. They don't much care about a low-level guy--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--as Davenport will come to find--full of surprises . . .

Zusammenfassung
"Addictive...Sandford always delivers rousing action scenes, but this time he's especially good on character, too....There s enough violence to satisfy bloodthirsty tastes, enough information on neofascism to give us a chill, and enough sly humor to make American teenagers and their would-be killers sound as if English were their second language. Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

"This entry in the phenomenally popular Prey series will engage longtime fans with its intricate plot and have new readers backtracking through the entire series. Thoroughly involving and very timely." Booklist

Leseprobe

Chapter

One

Audrey Coil and Blake Winston had been sexting each other for weeks.

Winston's penis, of which Coil had seen perhaps seven or eight iPhone views in a variety of penile moods, was not clearly different than the penises of a dozen other classmates that Coil had seen, circulated through the smartphones operated by girls in their final year at The Claridge School-a school with a capital-T in "The," so it wasn't some Claridge School, it was The Claridge School, of Reston, Virginia.

And Coil suspected that images of her breasts wouldn't exactly be breaking news among selected males of The Claridge School's senior class. She was correct in that. Neither Coil nor Winston was a virgin, having dispensed with that handicap in the fifth form, known in less snotty schools as eleventh grade. They hadn't yet fully engaged with each other, but were edging toward it . . . though, not yet.

All of that was neither here nor there. Right now, Coil's main preoccupation wasn't with Winston's junk, but with his totally erect Nikon Z6 camera.

There were LED light panels to her left and right, dimmed by photo umbrellas that would kill any harsh shadows. A smaller light sat directly behind her, braced on a toilet seat, providing a rim light that gave a soft glow to her auburn hair. The camera sat on a tripod in the bathroom doorway, with Winston behind it.

Winston, who was seventeen, would someday inherit a bazillion dollars; his father ran a hedge fund with offices in Birmingham, Alabama, and Manhattan. In addition, Winston was good-looking, with dark eyes and dark hair, a square chin, and a pale, flawless complexion. He was further distinguished by the fact that he was already operating a profitable after-school business in video production.

At the moment, they were jammed into Coil's bathroom on the second floor of the Coil house in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, DC.

Coil was dressed in a pale blue translucent chemise that revealed a slice of boob but-carefully-no nipple, because of the Puritan constraints of Instagram. Coil carried the fleshy pink face and body of a post-pubescent party chick, a tease and a promise, a girl that former President Bill Clinton would have instantly accepted as an intern. The daughter of U.S. Senator Roberta J. "Bob" Coil of Georgia, she was another budding entrepreneur and ran her own blog, which was spread across a number of social media outlets. The blog was called Young'nHot'nDC.

She had four paying sponsors: Macon Cosmo, a line of girly cosmetics out of Macon, Georgia; Sandy Silks, an Atlanta lingerie manufacturer marketing to richie-rich teens and college-age women; LA Psyche, a maker of dance-influenced tops and bottoms for young women, based in Paris (Texas); and Anshiser Aerospace, a defense company that simply wanted to encourage young entrepreneurs with no thought about influencing her mother, a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Coil turned away from a lighted makeup mirror, looked into the camera lens, smiled, and said, "Honest to God, I wouldn't bullshit you girls: this line from Macon blows everything else out of the water. Why? Because the colors are gorgeous and smooth and best of all, they stay put no matter what you do to them." She stuck out a long pink tongue, nearly touched her nose with it, then drew it back over her full upper lip, gave the lens a toothy smile, and asked, "Get it?"

ÒDone,Ó Winston said. ÒWe got it.Ó

"About time," Coil said. That had been the fourth take for two minutes of video.

They went into her bedroom and Coil put on her glasses-she never wore them in public-sat cross-legged on her bed, and reviewed the video on Winston's MacBook Pro. Coil, eyes narrowed in thought, said finally, "Y-e-a-a-a-ah, I think