A welcome change for Lucas

Silent Prey:

I finished this book earlier in the month and pretty much forgot about it.  I knew I had finished two books before Winter Prey, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what the other one was (besides The Gemini Effect).  That’s not a good sign for a book.  I think I was just sick of the bad guy in this one.  He was Bekker, continued from Eyes of Prey.  I was nearly sick of him in that book, and then he played such a major part in this book – it was just too much.  The other set of murders that Lucas was investigating were much more interesting.  My favorite part about the “Prey” books is that Lucas always keeps a little bit of his knowledge from us, the readers.  Some people might find that annoying, but I really like it.  It keeps me guessing, and I’ve always been surprised at the little twists that come out near the end.  All of the Prey books include stories from Lucas’ point of view, and stories from the killer’s point of view.  Most of the time, you know who the killer is, so the little bit of detail held back by Lucas keeps it interesting.  Anyway, suffer through this book to be able to move on to the much better Winter Prey.

Winter Prey:

This is book 5 in the Prey series.  Lucas is basically living a solitary life in his cabin in Wisconsin (at least I think it’s Wisconsin – somewhere super cold and snowy a few hours away from Minneapolis).  There’s a super bad guy called The Iceman.  You don’t know who he is until the last 90 pages or so, so that’s a definite change from the earlier Prey books.  You get the story from his point of view, but he just calls himself The Iceman.  I liked it.  Anyway, he’s a bad dude.  He kills an entire family because the teen girl has a picture of him with an underage boy.  It’s not a nice picture.  You can’t see his face in the picture, but he thinks it will give him away.  The entire story revolves around this picture, because it’s the main evidence in a child abuse/porn/pedophilia ring.

The town is a small one with intense winters.  Somehow even though it’s a small town, and everyone thinks they know everyone else’s business, nobody knows about the pedophilia ring.  Lucas is called in by the local sheriff to help investigate the murder of the family at the beginning.  He realized there’s much more going on than just this murder.

I liked the new characters in this book.  Since Lucas isn’t in Minneapolis, everyone is new.  He meets a new girl, and starts dating her.  I guess I should’ve realized earlier on that he was acting a little differently around her.  There’s always a woman in these books, and Lucas is always sleeping with her.  The way he describes Weather (the woman) and acts around her though, is different.  At the end he’s falling in love with her.  That’s definitely new.  We’ll see where this goes.

There is a lot of cat and mouse throughout the book while they’re trying to figure out what’s going on.  Weather is almost killed a few times.  In the end, the way the bad guy is finished off is very satisfying.  This might’ve been one of my favorite Prey books.