The Night Crew by John Sandford

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
May 1997

Since John Sandford first captured the attention of millions of readers with his 1989 debut, Rules of Prey, he has written eight books in the bestselling Prey series, featuring Minneapolis cop Lucas Davenport. With each novel in the series, Sandford has proven himself a master of suspense, and his ability to combine rich human drama with edge-of-the-seat suspense has earned him widespread critical acclaim and an ever-growing audience.

Now Sandford presents his fans with a remarkable new heroine in an extraordinary new thriller, The Night Crew. A departure from the Prey series, The Night Crew boasts a whole new cast of characters — and a brand-new level of suspense.

Anna Batory runs the night crew. Small, dark-haired, shy but tough, a Wisconsin farm girl on the streets of Los Angeles, she roams the city with her small band of video freelancers in their truck from ten to dawn, looking for news — accidents, robberies, murders, demonstrations — anything they can shoot and sell to the local stations or the networks. It's an exhilarating life...until two deaths hit Anna close to home.

One night, when Anna's crew is filming a suicide jumper who falls five stories to his death, Jason, her fill-in cameraman, is strangely affected. The next morning, Jason is found murdered on a beach. At first the police think that the deaths are unrelated, but too many coincidences and clues keep linking the deaths and leading back to Anna, revealing the dark truth of an obsessed madman. Through a series of bizarre and harrowing events, ghostsofAnna's past are stirred up and revealed to be intrinsically linked to the lives of Jason and the suicide jumper. Anna's world becomes as cold and dangerous as the night itself.

John Sandford has written thrilling stories before, but nothing to top the extraordinary suspense and tension of The Night Crew. It is an intense ride, and it is Sandford's most chilling novel yet.

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From the Publisher

A mobile unit of video freelancers prowls the streets to sell the footage they capture to the highest network bidder. It is an exhilarating life. But tonight, two deaths will change everything.

Publishers Weekly

Anna Batory, thin and "rail-hard" with "pale blue killer eyes," runs a small, independent TV-news night crew that peddles clips of crime scenes, fires, car crashes and other mayhem to local TV stations for a tidy profit. As always with Sandford ("Sudden Prey"), the novel opens on action, in this case the crew's taping of a lab break-in by animal-rights activists and of a drug-crazed teenager's jump from a hotel window. The crew moves from voyeurs of the action to unwilling participants when Anna's part-time cameraman is shot dead and mutilated and a friend of his is murdered in an equally grisly manner. It becomes increasingly clear that a psycho is stalking Anna and her crew. To nail him, she teams up with the divorced father of the jumper, lawyer and ex-cop Jake Harper. Anna, Jake and another crew member and his new girlfriend are all attacked by the psycho before the gory finale. The shift from his usual Minneapolis setting to L.A. brings out the noir in Sandford ("the real dawn, a great, unhappy light, like an old piece of newspaper being pushed over the mountains"), and the action and suspense are up to his usual high standard. But Anna is neither as appealing nor as complex as his customary hero, Lucas Davenport, and other characters also seem grey at times, their movements perfunctory. One can't blame Sandford for wanting to try something new after eight "Prey" novels since 1989 ("Sudden Prey", etc.), plus two thrillers under his real name, John Camp, but let's hope we haven't seen the last of Lucas. BOMC main selection

Library Journal

Sandford takes a break from his popular "Prey" series (e.g., Sudden Prey, LJ 4/1/96) with this tale about a freelance video crew that cruises the Los Angeles night in search of newsworthy mayhem.

Product Details

• Interviews & Essays

Interviews & Essays

Q:  What are the first lines of literature or poetry that come to mind?

A:  To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature's second course
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than to fly to others that we know not of.

Q:  Describe one thing in life that you have done but are glad you never have to do again.

A:  Almost everything -- but I once solo paddled a canoe down the Mississippi from the source in northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Sixty-nine days of mostly misery, which I remember fondly, and would never, ever do again....

Q:  Can you recall the most sensuously indulgent meal you've ever had? What was it, and can you share the recipe?

A:  Nope. Not into food. Probably a candy bar someplace ugly. I have a deep-seated affection for Almond Joy -- despite their habit of being half-melted when you get them -- but I don't know why. Maybe therapy would bring it out.

Q:  How does journalism and writing novels compare? Are you still involved in journalism?

A:  The key difference -- and I mean this seriously, as it is the one problem that most journalists can't deal with -- is length. Most journalists are unable (for lots of different reasons, including boredom) to create a unified whole story that stretches out 100,000 words or more and takes months of actual writing time. I still do occasional journalism and would like to do more. I consider myself a newspaper guy on a long coffee break.

Q:  We have heard you are involved with an archaeological dig. How did you get started?

A:  Ah, my favorite subject. For the Internet-enabled, which I guess everybody here would be, check www.rehov.org for an extended rundown, with pictures, of the dig. I've had a lifelong reading interest in history and archaeology (most recent work read: the three-volume Byzantium by John Julius Norwich), and in fact majored in history and lit in college. I got serious about archaeology a few years back, went around looking at digs and sites, last year spent some hard time on a dig at Beth Shean in Israel, and now I'm involved in a heavy way with a new dig at a place called Tel Rehov, which is a half an hour by car south of the Sea of Galilee.

Q:  What is it like?

A:  It's very hot, dusty, butt-kicking work, and totally fascinating. Last year we cleared the iron age walls of Beth Shean, which are the very walls (well, okay, maybe) where the Philistines hung the bodies of King Saul and his sons after they killed them in a battle near Mt. Gilboa.... This year we've got a bit of a mystery on our hands: a very large, untouched tel, obviously the remains of a city, but a city we know hardly anything about. We surveyed it this spring, found pottery from the bronze through the Ottoman eras, which covers the better part of 3,000 years...great stuff. And we're looking for volunteers -- see the web site.

Q:  The Night Crew is clearly not a Prey novel. Why? Are you currently writing a Prey novel, or do you plan to do something else for a while?

A:  I am currently writing a Prey novel. The Night Crew was meant as a break after eight years of Lucas Davenport, but now I'm back, and this one feels pretty good. I don't know if I'll go back to the Night Crew again, but it is a possibility. I liked the Anna Batory character, and Creek, and I'm not sure I'm done with them.