A gang of four thieves may be in Minneapolis for the Republican National Convention, and they may be planning something.  Lucas Davenport, of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, wants to catch them before they pull whatever caper they're planning. When they begin to close in, though, a street patrolman, acting on a tip without backup, is murdered by the gang's leader. The stakes are immediately raised. Finding four needles in a haystack is as difficult as finding one, especially when the haystack is filled with thousands of visitors. In a concurrent story line, Davenport's streetwise 14-year-old adopted daughter has taken it on herself to engineer the arrest of a former perp who wants revenge on Davenport for sending him to prison. Sandford's track record as a best-selling author is amazing, but it's not an accident. His plotting is sharp, his villains are extraordinarily layered, and his good guys are always evolving. Case in point: the subplot involving the adopted daughter reveals a young woman who, had circumstances been a bit different, might have developed into a rival capable of testing Davenport's limits. She still might. Stay tuned. Sharp, edgy entertainment.

The 2008 Republican National Convention sweeps into the Twin Cities, bringing in its wake a world of trouble for Lucas Davenport's hometown. When you think Republicans, you think big money. So do supercriminal Brutus Cohn and Rosie Cruz, his partner in a scheme to rob the visiting delegates blind. Working with ex-cons Jesse Lane and Tate McCall, they start out small, with a series of hotel-room invasions aimed at walking-around money whose loss they assume won't be reported to the law because it's already illegal. But all that changes when they're forced to kill a suburban police officer. Lucas Davenport, of Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (Phantom Prey, 2008, etc.), soon figures out what sort of violent, cold-hearted crooks he's up against, but with every law-enforcement officer in Minneapolis / St. Paul already detailed to the convention, it's hard to know what to doespecially against lawbreakers who soon figure out that he's onto them. From that point on Sandford expertly dramatizes a tug-of-war complicated by two wild cards: Oklahoma neo-Nazi sharpshooter Justice Shafer, who claims he's just passing through, and cranked-up paraplegic Randy Whitcomb, a sociopath determined to wreak vengeance against Lucas, the man he holds responsible for ruining his life. Killing Lucas, Randy decides, would be too easy; he'll go after his family instead. So as Lucas is strained to the max responding to the rising tide of violence against the well-heeled delegates and their protectors, someone he's never thought about is planning to blindside him. Especially notable here is the unsought help Lucas receives from a charmingly unlikely guardian angel who takes the battle against his family back to the villain. The multiple plots are untidily stuck together, as if with mucilage, but Sandford keeps stepping up the pressure until it seems as if more than Randy Whitcomb is running on crank.

The 2008 Republican convention serves as the backdrop for bestseller Sandford's amped-up, ultra-violent 19th thriller to feature Lucas Davenport of the Minneapolis Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (after Phantom Prey). An assassination plot aimed at John McCain turns out to be just a sidebar to another criminal operation-extremely slick thieves have come to the twin cities to rob Republican political operatives loaded down with millions of dollars of "street money," illegal handouts for low-level campaign workers. Mastermind Rosie Cruz handles the gang's complicated planning, while gangster Brutus Cohn does the robbery and killing aided by a couple of lesser thugs. A subplot involving Davenport's teenage ward, Letty West, who's provided interesting complications in the series, establishes her as a brave and intrepid investigator. A slam-bang shootout climax proves that Davenport still has what it takes when it comes to guts and gunplay.