Description:

Amazon.com Review

Anna Batory's evening starts with a frenzied animal rights raid and then moves quickly to the site of a suicide jump. It's all in a normal night's work for Anna, who leads the Night Crew, a freelance video team out to make a quick buck on sensational footage they can sell to L.A. news stations. But this night is different: the jumper is a teenager named Jacob Harper, and Anna's cameraman Jason beats a strangely hasty exit after filming the jump. A few hours later, Jason too is dead: shot and knifed.

Jacob Harper's father is an attractive former cop who works out the connection between his son's death and Jason's. The two young men share a drug dealer--and when Harper finds said dealer dead as well, he calls Anna to the scene and shows her a creepy knife wound on the dealer's body: the name "Anna" carved into his chest. From that moment on, Anna knows she's chasing down a killer who's got a thing for her--but who is it? A series of heart-thumping encounters between Anna and her shadowy stalker keep this thriller moving at the dizzying clip that Sandford's fans expect.

Those who love the Prey series for the quirks and contradictions of its antihero, Lucas Davenport, will find a kindred creation in Anna: an attractive loner, taciturn and tough-minded, a classical pianist with the fighting reflexes of a wild animal. Will Sandford keep bringing her back? Time will tell. --Barrie Trinkle

From Library Journal

The author of eight previous thrillers in his "Prey" series (e.g., Sudden Prey, LJ 4/1/96), Sandford here provides an action-packed novel. Anna Batory, deceptively thin and small for a woman who is both emotionally and physically tough, heads an L.A. unit of video freelancers who search for news by night. The story begins in medias res with the crew covering first an animal rights protest and then a young man's jumping from a building to his death. That night, Jason O'Brien, Anna's back-up cameraman, is viciously slain. It soon becomes apparent that the violence is connected to and aimed at Anna. Jake Harper, a former policeman and father of the jumper, becomes Anna's bodyguard and lover. This thriller has an appealing heroine and well-developed secondary characters. The dialog is clever and hard-edged, black humor abounds, and the romance factor is handled deftly. Unfortunately, while the villain is sufficiently vicious and his crimes grisly, he ultimately comes across as pathetic rather than menacing. Still, Sanford fans will not be disappointed; this is an exciting thriller. Recommended for general readers.
-?Jacqueline Seewald, Red Bank Regional H.S., Little Silver, N.J.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.