Line #57 Creator/JohnSandford


1	John Sandford is the pen name of John Roswell Camp (born February 23, 1944), a Pulitzer-winning reporter who decided to branch out into crime novels. Unusually, he had two debut novels, ''The Fool's Run'' featuring Kidd, a computer hacker, and ''Rules of Prey'' featuring Lucas Davenport, a hard-nosed detective. To avoid the gaffe of having two debut novels and to appease the two separate publishers he'd sold the stories to, he published ''Rules of Prey'' under a pen name of John Sandford and ''The Fool's Run'' under John Camp, his real name. Currently, all of his books are released under his pen name. He has a [[http://www.johnsandford.org/ website]] run by his son which includes a substantial amount of reference material on what went into individual stories and how they evolved.
2
3	His fiction works include:
4	!!''The Prey Series'' featuring Lucas Davenport
5	* Rules of Prey
6	* Shadow Prey
7	* Eyes of Prey
8	* Silent Prey
9	* Winter Prey
10	* Night Prey
11	* Mind Prey
12	* Sudden Prey
13	* Secret Prey
14	* Certain Prey
15	* Easy Prey
16	* Chosen Prey
17	* Mortal Prey
18	* Naked Prey
19	* Hidden Prey
20	* Broken Prey
21	* Invisible Prey
22	* Phantom Prey
23	* Wicked Prey
24	* Storm Prey
25	* Buried Prey
26	* Stolen Prey
27	* Silken Prey
28	* Field of Prey
29	* Gathering Prey
30	* Extreme Prey
31	* Golden Prey
32	* Twisted Prey
33	* Neon Prey
34	* Masked Prey
35
36	!!''The Kidd Series'' featuring Kidd
37	* The Fool's Run
38	* The Empress File
39	* The Devil's Code
40	* The Hanged Man's Song
41
42	!!''The Virgil Flowers Series'' featuring Virgil Flowers
43	* Dark of the Moon
44	* Heat Lightning
45	* Rough Country
46	* Bad Blood
47	* Shock Wave
48	* Mad River
49	* Storm Front
50	* Deadline
51	* Escape Clause
52	* Deep Freeze
53	* Holy Ghost
54	* Bloody Genius
55
56	!!Standalone books
57	* The Night Crew
58	* Dead Watch
59	* Saturn Run
60	----
61	!! Tropes Associated with John Sandford
62
63	* AllForNothing:
64	** In ''Phantom Prey'', [[spoiler:Alyssa is killing the people who suspects of her daughter's death due to their lifestyle choices, only to find out all of them were innocent and the real killer is someone she never suspected who the police arrest before she can even consider revenge]].
65	** In ''Extreme Prey'' Marlys Purdy schemes to murder presidential candidate Michaelea Bowden, due to distrusting her for poorly defined reasons and wanting Governor Henderson to be president instead. Henderson in the meantime has told Lucas that he probably ''couldn't'' be selected as the presidential candidate and is hoping to be picked as Bowden's vice-president. Purdy's actions just kill more than twenty innocent people, along with Purdy and her younger son/accomplice, and make Bowden immensely popular due to her and Henderson behaving heroically in the aftermath of an attempted bombing. And as shown in the next book, Bowden ''still'' isn't elected president, being defeated by the Republican candidate, making ''everything'' that Purdy did utterly pointless.
66	* AttentionWhore: The killer in [[spoiler:''Easy Prey'']], with Lucas exploiting this to get him to surrender (and not harm his hostages) in exchange for being interviewed by a couple of reporters first.
67	* AxCrazy: The majority of his villains relish killing.
68	* BrotherSisterIncest: Ammon and Alle'e in the backstory of "Easy Prey".
69	* BringMyBrownPants: In ''Stolen Prey'', a man who got caught RobbingTheMobBank deliberately poops his pants while being confronted by a team of torturers so they will let him clean himself off before torturing him. This makes them underestimate him and let him into the bathroom to clean up, and he quickly slams the door, blocks it, dives into a bullet resistant bathtub and starts yelling out the window for help.
70	* ContinuityDrift: In one of the more recent Davenport novels, which is mostly a prequel, Sloan's first name is revealed, and it's made clear that Lucas has known it for the entire series, which does not give with the LastNameBasis used earlier in the books.
71	* CowboyCop: Lucas Davenport starts off as one of these, but after a few books, a combination of {{Deconstruction}} and CharacterDevelopment starts to broaden him out.
72	* CultDefector: ''Bad Blood'' features a ReligionOfEvil with a generations-old culture centered around pedophilia and incest. When Flowers and his men go to arrest the cult leader, they find him being held at gunpoint and subjected to a mock trial by his daughter and granddaughters, now that his men are all dead, arrested, or on the run. The daughter of another perpetrator, despite being ConditionedToAcceptHorror, is happy to confirm the detectives' suspicions and direct them to evidence as soon as they question her.
73	* DeadpanSnarker: Almost everyone, but particularly notable in the Kidd books, which are narrated by Kidd in first person.
74	* EvilMatriarch: Margery Singleton in ''Naked Prey'', who is the one driving her son and the others to commit the kidnappings and murders of wealthy children, [[spoiler:murders her son's MoralityPet when she walks in at the wrong time]], and is even prepared to [[spoiler:set her son up to be killed by the police with no remorse or hesitation]] in a failed attempt to cover her tracks.
75	* IdentityImpersonator: In [[spoiler:''Broken Prey'']], Lucas has a suspect there's a very strong case against, but who seems to be above reproach. Then he calls the man's last place of business for information and finds out the guy is still working there and the man he's met is an imposter.
76	* IdiosyncraticEpisodeNaming: Every volume of the Davenport series has the word Prey in it; the volumes of the Kidd series have TarotMotifs in their titles.
77	* JurisdictionFriction: In their BCA days, both Davenport and Flowers occasionally encounter this, with ''Mad River'' being the worst case.
78	* LastNameBasis: Detective Sloan from the Davenport series.
79	-->'''Davenport''': What is Sloan's first name, anyway?
80	-->'''Sloan's Wife''': [[DeadpanSnarker I never asked.]]
81	* LineOfSightName: A major character in the Davenport novels is named ''Del Capslock''.
82	* LittleMissBadass: Lucas's future foster daughter Letty is introduced as a young kid who does her own hunting for sustenance and survives an attack on her life.
83	* ManOfTheCity: ''Silent Prey'' features a KillerCop who passionately argues that he can make Manhattan about twenty times safer by killing a hundred people (repeat offenders, a particularly successful criminal defense attorney, etc.).
84	* MamaBear: Happens often, but a notable example is in ''Golden Prey'', where the drug cartel kidnaps the mother of a man they're chasing (in an EvilVersusEvil conflict) and torture her for the names of other people close to him, and she deliberately withholds the name of her daughter and granddaughter (who live very close by).
85	* MinnesotaNice: Played with. Some characters display the trope, and others play up to it to mess with out of state visitors.
86	* MostWritersAreWriters: Largely averted. Flowers is the only published author in the series, although Davenport is a game designer, which is similar in some ways.
87	* PhraseCatcher: No matter how they meet him, sooner or later everyone calls Virgil Flowers "that fuckin' Flowers". Usually sooner.
88	* RulesLawyer: Happens often. For instance in ''Broken Prey'', the assistant mental hospital administrator tells the imprisoned serial killers serving as the BigBadEnsemble (their apprentice is the one out killing while they take sadistic pleasure through the details of his crimes, meaning they aren't likely to be cooperative) that if they want a lawyer when Lucas questions them then they'll have to spend a few days in isolation to make sure they they don't have any [[AssShove contraband in their bodies]].
89	--> '''Administrator Ross:''' That might convince them that they don't need an attorney.... Supreme Court says we can use reasonable security measures. [[ScrewTheRulesIMakeThem We get to say what's reasonable]].
90	* SequelNonEntity: ''Storm Prey'' features Marcy having remarried with a young son, yet in the very next book, ''Mortal Prey'' no mention at all is made of them [[spoiler:Despite Marcy's dying in that book]] and her inner monologue implies that there would be nothing to stop her from getting back together with Lucas if he and Weather ever divorced.
91	* ThoseTwoGuys: BCA agents Shrake and Jenkins, who often appear together and work with Lucas and Virgil for long periods of time and are largely interchangeable.
92	* TheUnfairSex: Female murderers and accomplices are more than twice as likely to survive their novels, or even become a KarmaHoudini, than male ones.
93	* UsefulNotes/TwinCities: the setting of almost all Sandford's novels - and the ones set elsewhere usually feature characters from there prominently.
94	* UnderlingWithAnFInPR: The killers in ''Shadow Prey'' target businessmen and politicians who are prejudiced against Native Americans and hope to inspire other oppressed Native Americans to take the initiative. In the final act, their two leaders are exasperated when their hot-headed main enforcer and son ([[MamasBabyPapasMaybe they both slept with his mother around the time he was conceived and helped raise him together]]) keeps deciding MurderIsTheBestSolution for dealing with people who aren't on their list of targets. His actions make the group as a whole look more bloodthirsty and hypocritical than it is, something they never fully shake off.
95	---> '''Sam Crow''': That fucking kid is ruinin' us.
96	* TheVerse: The Kidd, Davenport and Flowers novels all take place in the same universe - notably, all three characters appear in ''Invisible Prey''.
97	* WorldOfSnark: St Paul/Minneapolis, apparently.

Context Creator / JohnSandford