Rules of Prey

Making his fiction debut, "Sandford," a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist using a pseudonym, has taken a stock suspense plot a dedicated cop pursuing an ingenious serial killer and dressed it up into the kind of pulse-quickening, irresistibly readable thriller that many of the genre's best-known authors would be proud to call their own. A killer who calls himself the "maddog" has been murdering Minneapolis women, seemingly without pattern or motive. The crimes are linked only by their brutality and by the slayer's "signature": at each scene, he leaves a written rule of crime, such as "Never kill anyone you know," or "Never carry a weapon after it has been used." Into the case comes Lucas Davenport, a policeman with five kills in the line of duty, a surefire sense of how to handle the thirsty media and strong instincts about the killer's psyche. Sandford offers no mystery here; the killer's identity is revealed in the first pages, and the suspense comes in waiting for him or Davenport to slip up.