The company chairman lay on the cold ground of the woods, his eyes unseeing, his orange hunting jacket punctured by a rifle bullet fired at close range. Near him stood the four executives with whom he had been hunting, each with his or her own complicated agenda, each with a reason not to be sorrowful about the man’s death. There were currents running through this group, hints and whispers of something much greater than the murder of a single man. Davenport had felt this way not long before, sensed the curling of an indefinable evil, and not only had it almost gotten him killed, it had lost him his fiancee, who’d never been able to recover from the violence of the encounter. Sometime soon, unless he could stop it, there would be another death, and then another, and Davenport couldn’t help wondering if maybe this time, the final death might not be his own…

Sudden Prey begins with a death and ends with one. For months, Lucas Davenport’s men have been tracking a vicious woman bank robber named Candy, and when they finally catch up with her, she does not go quietly. In the ensuing shoot-out, she dies – and Davenport’s nightmare starts. For her associates are even worse than she was, particularly her husband, a deeply violent man who swears an appropriate revenge: first he will find the names of those responsible; then he will kill those will kill those nearest and dearest to them, just the way they did Candy. And so it begins. The husband of one officer is shot and killed. The wife of another is ambushed at work. When a third attack is thwarted, the pattern becomes clear to Davenport, and with an urgency born of rage and terror, he presses the hunt, desperately trying to track down the killers before they can strike again, before they can reach out for Davenport’s own loved ones. But in this effort, he may already be too late.

“Run for it.” It was raining when psychiatrist Andi Manette left the parent-teacher conference with her two young daughters, and she was distracted. She barely noticed the red van parked near her, barely noticed the van door slide open as they dashed to the car. The last thing she did notice was the hand reaching out for her and the voice from out of the past – and then the three of them were gone. Hours later, Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport stood in the parking lot, a bloody shoe in his hand, the ground stained pink around him, and knew, instinctively, that this would be one of the worst cases he’d ever been on. A man who could steal children . . . With an urgency born of dread, Lucas presses the attack, while in an isolated farmhouse, Andi Manette does the same, summoning all her skills to battle an obsessed captor. She knows the man who has taken her and her daughters, knows there is a chink in his armor, if only she can find it. But for both her and Davenport, time is already running out.