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Storm Prey returns John Sandford (the pen name of journalist John Camp) to the "Prey" series and the character that he's best known for, investigator Lucas Davenport. Davenport and his team begin investigating a drug theft at a Minneapolis hospital in which one of the pharmacists is killed. But it turns out that Davenport's wife Weather, a surgeon at the hospital, may have seen the thieves as they were driving away. The thieves have an inside man at the hospital, who quickly learns that Weather did indeed see at least one of the men in the getaway car and police are now working to identify them. Davenport must track down the gang before they make a move to silence Weather, who is in the middle of a series of operations separating Siamese twins joined at the skull. Davenport is his usual tough-guy self, a walking advertisement for anger-management classes and he and his team wise-crack and sleuth their way through a series of leads to find the criminals. Meanwhile, Sandford also follows the gang's story as they try to figure out what to do about Weather -- and about each other, because they are no longer sure they can trust their own associates. That part of the story is almost more interesting, because even though the gang is deadly to several people they encounter, they're basically losers. Sandford spent many years on the police beats in St. Paul and in Miami and knows that, unlike the nefarious masterminds whose intricate plots decorate the television and movie screens, a lot of lawbreakers are none too bright. But even losers can be harmful to those who cross their paths, so Davenport can't waste any time running them down. Storm Prey is neither the best nor the worst of the Prey series, and Sandford's skill keeps things moving and doesn't bog down in clichéd situations or dialogue. "Weather" is still a really dumb name for a character, though.
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Mark of the Assassin is a kind of prequel to Daniel Silva's headliner series about Israeli spy Gabriel Allon. Allon's mentor and boss Ariel Shamron makes a brief appearance, but the protagonist of the story is Michael Osbourne, a CIA case officer drawn into the investigation of a terrorist-downed jetliner that provides at least one body dead with a familiar bullet pattern. An assassin leaving the same mark killed a woman Osbourne loved many years ago, and he wants a chance to catch the man now. At the same time, political operatives throughout Washington want to use the attack to suit their own ends, some of which wouldn't be helped if Osbourne gets his man. Osbourne is distracted by personal matters, as he and his wife are working with doctors to conceive a long-desired child and his wife wonders why other things always take the place of her and the baby they want to have. Silva's writing and characterization skills were already well-developed in this, his second novel. The story rarely, if ever, bogs down to relate details or explain things, but it doesn't need to because Silva knows how to bring a reader from point A to point B without going the long way. The story itself, which relies at one point on a kind of international cabal of shadowy figures, is weaker than the Allon stories will be when it leans on these kinds of tired conventions, but is definitely strong enough to see why Silva keeps selling books.
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