Dead Watch by John Sandford

Biography

Whether they are fans of John Sandford's Prey series or John Camp's Kidd series, mystery readers are delighted by one author's ability to create nasty good guys -- and even nastier villains. Throw them in the middle of a spine-tingling plot, and you've got one of the best suspense writers on the scene.

Camp started his career as a crime reporter at The Miami Herald, moving to Minnesota's Saint Paul Pioneer Press & Dispatch in 1978 to work as a general reporter and eventually becoming one of the paper's most popular columnists and feature writers. His five-part series on the farm crisis in southwest Minnesota charted the ups and downs of one farm family for an entire year. The series, "Life on the Land: An American Farm Family," won Camp many awards, most notably a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and an American Society of Newspaper Editors award for Non-Deadline Feature Writing.

Camp soon fused his journalistic instincts with his talent for telling fantastic stories, and his career as a novelist took off with the release of two "first" novels. Within a few short months, The Fool's Run was released under the name John Camp and Rules of Prey under the name John Sandford, due to the fact that two different publishing companies were putting out the books. To this day, the Pray series bears the Sandford byline, while the author's original name remains attached to the Kidd series.

With a passion for history and archaeology, Camp has recently worked at a number of archaeological digs, mainly Tel Rehov in Israel, which is 30 minutes south of the Sea of Galilee. Among his group's accomplishments are uncovered the remains of a city and finding pottery from the Bronze Age through the Ottoman era -- a range of almost 3,000 years. Outside of writing, this is one of Camp's greatest loves, which he describes as "very hot, dusty, butt-kicking work, and totally fascinating."

Camp has also authored two nonfiction books. The Eye and the Heart: The Watercolors of John Stuart Ingle examines the life and work of Camp's favorite Minnesota artist. And in Plastic Surgery: The Kindest Cut Camp teamed up with Bruce Cunningham, a surgeon at the University of Minnesota, to provide readers with a comprehensive, unbiased overview of common procedures, their costs and effects.

The wildly popular Prey series has yielded a string of bestsellers and a loyal fan base, thanks to its protagonist, the hard-boiled, iconoclastic detective Lucas Davenport. Fans of Sandford keep coming back for his intelligent plots, gut-level intensity, and villains as sympathetically human as his heroes. Asked whether he would ever kill off his signature character, Lucas Davenport, Sandford told the MSN Books and Reading forum in 1999, "I don't want to kill Davenport off, but I would like to see him go out with some kind of good relation with a woman and the possibility of long-term happiness."

Good to Know

Don't confuse John Sandford with John Sanford -- it's one of Sandford's pet peeves. Sanford (without the "d") is a Christian philosophy writer.

The Sandford pseudonym has caused a few problems for Camp in the past. At an airport once, his ticket was reserved under Sandford, while all of his identification, of course, had the name Camp. Luckily, he had one of his novels with him, and thanks to the book jacket photo, he was able to convince airport security to let him on the plane. Sandford, by the way, is John's father's middle name.

Sandford's four novels in the Kidd series are, in fact, written chronologically, something many readers do not realize. The paperback version of the second novel in the series, The Empress File, erroneously claims that it is the first. It's not, and the series is best read in this order: The Fool's Run, The Empress File, The Devil's Code, and The Hanged Man's Song.

Feature Interview

I read thrillers all the time -- I love them, but it's also part of my business, so I do not include them on my summer reading list. Summer reading to me has always meant a book I might not otherwise look at, and that I wound up enjoying enormously. These are listed in no particular order.