Revenge Prey (A Prey Novel, Band 36) - Hardcover

Sandford, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593852060 ISBN 13: 9780593852064

Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTELLER

Lucas Davenport must track down a ruthless Russian hit team, in this latest thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford.

Leonard Summers—not his real name—is on the run. A former high-ranking Russian intelligence officer who defected to the U.S. after providing critical information about Russian spies in U.S. government service, Leonard,  his wife Martha, and son Bernard have spent the past year holed up in a CIA facility near Washington. After the CIA makes a deal with the U.S. Marshal Service’s Witness Protection Program (WPP), Leonard’s family is transported to Minneapolis. The plan is to hide them in a wooded Minneapolis suburb that resembles their former home and dacha near Moscow.

The Summers are received at their destination by Lucas Davenport and fellow marshal Shelly White. Unbeknownst to them, the WPP group has been tracked by a Russian hit team. And while nobody in the WPP has ever been attacked…Leonard might be the first victim. As shots are fired and enemies dodged, Lucas must move quickly to uncover where the leak is coming from, before the hit team can strike again.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Sandford is the pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist John Camp. He is the author of thirty-four Prey novels; two Letty Davenport novels; four Kidd novels; twelve Virgil Flowers novels; three YA novels coauthored with his wife, Michele Cook; and three other books.

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1She had long blond hair and was almost pretty, in the manner of tennis jocks and female gymnasts; too much muscle in the face and arms and butt for the smooth baby-fat look of fashion models or movie stars.Because she wasn't one.Despite the cold, she was lying on her parka, instead of wearing it, the better to anchor the rifle against her shoulder. She put the crosshairs on the target, took up the trigger slack, and squeezed. The recoil was sharp, but manageable.The man lying in the dirt next to her, looking through a spotting scope, said, "Two centimeters high, a centimeter right. Once more."She took her time and squeezed again. The spotter said, "Same hole."She said, "I'm so fucking cold, I feel like a goddamned фруктовый лёд." In English, literally, a "fruit ice," or not so literally, a "Popsicle.""Forget the cold," the man said. He had a hard, narrow face and black hair over black eyes. "Three rounds, fast."The three rounds went out in less than three seconds, and he said, "All over the place, left right and high, all within six centimeters of the ten-ring.""So it's good.""Better than good. I've seen what it does to gelatin. If you hit the target anywhere above the waist, he's dead," the man said, rolling on his side to look at her. "These copper bullets won't defeat Level 4, but armor-piercing will. Shoots so flat . . . I want to take one home with me.""If I could shoot as well as you do, I would find a way to do that," the woman said, handing him the rifle. "Maybe a custom barrel with handloads. The perfect weapon."They were lying in a ditch ten miles west of the small town of Owatonna, Minnesota, an informal shooting range, located by their concierge, who was waiting nervously by the car."I wish it was suppressed," the woman added."You know the English proverb, 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride'?"Some wrinkles appeared in her forehead: "I'm not sure what that means . . ."The proverb didn't quite translate, because they were speaking in Russian.Because they were Russian.A snaky blacktopped driveway led up a gentle slope to the hideout. Two other houses were fed from the same cul-de-sac, all three out of sight of one another, a carefully contrived privacy set in a suburban forest. Natural shingle siding, a gray-stone chimney, and high peaked roof gave the hideout the vibe of a Minnesota lake chalet, although the nearest big water was a mile away.The marshals arrived in separate vehicles, Lucas Davenport pushing his Porsche Cayenne up the driveway, while Shelly White left her 4Runner in the street and walked up to meet Lucas."The guy gets this place for free? They just gave it to him?" White asked, peering squint-eyed at the house of her dreams, which were unlikely to be realized.The afternoon light was draining away, a sullen, tangible gathering of gloom, as happens in Minnesota on overcast February days. "The way of the world, sweetheart. You get big enough, you get bad enough, they hand you the fat stacks."The hideout was one of twelve houses nestled on four back-to-back cul-de-sacs. Seen from a satellite, the cul-de-sacs resembled a four-leaf clover, set down in a winter landscape of barren broad-leafed trees and evergreens that appeared black in the murky afternoon light.Shelly White looked like a semi-starved Depression-era farm wife, maybe caught on black-and-white film rattling out of Oklahoma, six snot-nosed kids in a broke-down Model T Ford. She had the knife-edge cheekbones, the pale gray eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare, the parched lips held in a tight straight line.White had never been in Oklahoma, wasn't starving, and she drove a Toyota SUV much too fast for the crappy suspension. She was a deputy U.S. Marshal who'd grown up in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, looking across the Red River at North Dakota. Four years as an Air Force cop and a degree in criminology got her a job with the U.S. Marshals Service.She and Lucas, another deputy marshal, hadn't particularly liked each other when they first met, but they got along, and after a couple of years, had warmed up. Lucas had three natural children with two different women, plus an adoptive daughter; White had three children with two different men, so they had blended families to talk about. Along with guns, fugitives, and mandatory overtime.White was on the short side, thin and tough as a razor strop. A Glock 9mm hung on her right hip. Below that hip, out of sight beneath her winter cover-ups, she had a massive scar on her thigh where she'd been shot with a fast-expanding jacketed hollow-point bullet from a deer rifle.Just . . . life in the Marshals Service.As they stood side-by-side, Lucas loomed over her, a substantial opposite, with expensively cut dark hair threaded with gray and crystalline blue eyes. He was tall, wide across the shoulders. A hairline scar tracked across his left eye from his forehead to his cheek, a relic of a fishing trip. Another puckered scar sat on his throat, where a teenaged girl had shot him with a piece-of-crap .22 that he hadn't seen coming. He had a nonstandard Walther 40 S&W on his left hip, in a cross-draw holster, for easier access under a suit coat.Lucas had a tendency toward depression, exacerbated by the gloom of winter, and by the sporadic violence of the job. White shared the depressive gene, and they sometimes compared notes. When Lucas was younger, he hadn't worried about it. Now, in his later fifties, he had a tendency to think he'd been shot too often and to brood about the near-death experiences. About what he'd miss, if he were dead; about not seeing his younger children grow into adults.White had thoughts that ran down in the same trench.Still, they both were hunters, trackers. They liked the intensity of the work, if not always the consequences, because the intensity went some way toward offsetting the blues.“I don’t know why they put us out here,” White said, looking around like a curious cat, her nose twitching in the wind. Although she was wearing a down parka, ski gloves, and a cashmere watch cap over her streaky brown hair, she shivered. They were standing at the top of the driveway, in a grove of paper birches, the kind the Ojibwe once turned into canoes.The ground, hard as pig iron, was covered with half an inch of crunchy snow. There'd been almost no snow over the winter months, but they'd gotten all the usual cold weather. The temperature, according to Lucas's weather app, was six degrees and falling, and a persistent breeze whipped the steam away from their mouths. "I'm not a babysitter," she added."This guy is no baby," Lucas said. He coughed once, covering his mouth with a gloved fist. He wasn't sick; the bitter cold set him off. He could feel his lips cracking, and he'd left his ChapStick sitting on his dresser. "He was in some kind of enforcement branch of the Russian spy agency. He's probably killed more people than the Marshals Service.""Yeah, but why us in particular?" White asked. "Why not Remy, or that asshole Clark? They'd jump at it, hanging out with headquarters guys.""Because I'm the smartest guy in the office, and you're a close second? They thought the job might take some brains.""You're almost smart enough to get that almost right," White said, shivering again. She'd been a National Merit Scholar in high school and Lucas hadn't been; but then, he'd been a hockey jock, and what could you expect from somebody who'd been hit in the head with a puck, and more than once? "But really?""Because Witness Protection doesn't babysit, either," Lucas said. "They plug a guy into a hideout and that's it. This guy . . . The Russians would like to get at him. They need somebody with guns close by, or think they do. That's not usually Witness Protection."“All right,” White said. She’d done time with fugitive task forces and considered her Glock to be a species of musical instrument. Lucas had a reputation as a shooter, which he didn’t entirely appreciate, because it suggested he was too fast on the trigger....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593852060
• ISBN 13: 9780593852064
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: G.P. Putnam's Sons; https://www.penguin.com/putnam/; ; 1745 BROADWAY Attn: Madison Forsander; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland