Anna Batory is a smart, tough, ambitious video freelanceer whose nightlife consists of riding the mean streets of L.A. with her motley crew of cameramen, looking for hot stories she can tape and sell to the TV station offering the highest bid. One eventful night, she and her crew tape a raid by animal-rights activists, then hurry to the scene of a suicide, where a high-school kid has just jumped off a balcony after a drug overdose. The next morning, one of Anna's crew members turns up dead, sliced, diced, and beaten to a pulp by an obvious madman. Anna hooks up with the dead high-school kid's dad, Jake Harper, a former L.A. cop who wants to avenge his son's death. He and Anna soon find puzzling links between young Harper's death and the death of Anna's crewman. The tension spirals higher as Jake and Anna track down clues, circling ever closer to the killer. Well-orchestrated suspense, nonstop action, plenty of unexpected twists, and a superb climax will keep readers riveted. Sandford, whose Prey series has been a huge commercial success, offers up a feisty new heroine and plenty of human interest in this slick, sleek, nightmarish thriller.

The pseudonymous Sandford takes a break from his popular series featuring top Minneapolis cop Lucas Davenport (Sudden Prey, 1996, etc.) to offer a thriller whose gutsy heroine pursues the psychopath who's stalking her around the Los Angeles basin. A midwestern farm girl whose musical talents proved insufficient to gain her a concert pianist's career, Anna Batory (now nearing 40) works at an unusual trade. With partner Creek (a gentle giant who did time for running marijuana from Mexico), she heads a television camera crew that prowls L.A. County from midnight until dawn on the lookout for airworthy stories that can be sold to local stations or the networks. Soon after an eventful evening – the freelancers provided exclusive film coverage of the dramatic death of a teenager who jumped from a hotel ledge while high on speed – the body of Jason O'Brien, a part-time videocam operator for Anna who filmed the suicide, washes up on the Santa Monica beach. Anna meets Jake Harper, an ex-sheriff's deputy turned lawyer and the father of the boy who committed suicide. He believes that there's a connection between the deaths of Jason and his son and that Anna may be in danger. After her home is broken into and Creek is badly wounded by a pistol-wielding assailant, she joins forces with Jake. Desperate to make a connection that could lead them to her anonymous pursuer, Anna (by now romantically involved with Jake) wonders whether her lost love, a composer who's back on the West Coast courtesy of a UCLA fellowship, might be the guilty party. Instead, a violent climactic confrontation that costs Anna dearly reveals that her manic nemesis is not from the daydreamy past but the nightside present. A credibly gallant woman on the trail of a notably demented weirdo in a host of after-hours venues – a winning and suspense-filled combination for the ultraprofessional Sandford.

The author of eight previous thrillers in his Prey series (e.g., Sudden Prey), Sandford here provides an action-packed novel. Anna Batory, deceptively thin and small for a woman who is both emotionally and physically tough, heads an L.A. unit of video freelancers who search for news by night. The story begins in medias res with the crew covering first an animal rights protest and then a young man's jumping from a building to his death. That night, Jason O'Brien, Anna's back-up cameraman, is viciously slain. It soon becomes apparent that the violence is connected to and aimed at Anna. Jake Harper, a former policeman and father of the jumper, becomes Anna's bodyguard and lover. This thriller has an appealing heroine and well-developed secondary characters. The dialog is clever and hard-edged, black humor abounds, and the romance factor is handled deftly. Unfortunately, while the villain is sufficiently vicious and his crimes grisly, he ultimately comes across as pathetic rather than menacing. Still, Sanford fans will not be disappointed; this is an exciting thriller.

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.