Best-selling novelist Sanford introduces a new character, Letty Davenport, in this series starter. Letty is the stepdaughter of Sanford's popular police detective, Lucas Davenport, the star of Sanford's prolific "Prey" series. Letty is smart, feisty, confident, and a better shot than most men. When millions of dollars of crude oil go missing from a major oil-drilling company, Homeland Security hires Letty to find out who is stealing the oil and why. She is paired with veteran DHS investigator John Kaiser. Together, they uncover a right-wing militia group that is siphoning off the oil to raise money for an operation on the U.S. and Mexican border. The situation becomes tense when the militia takes over a small Texas border town and steals explosives and detonators from the army. John and Letty must stop the operation before hundreds of asylum seekers are killed. Narrator Richard Ferrone does an excellent job reading the book. He brings out each character's distinctive voice and personality. Especially well done and entertaining is the easy repartee between John and Letty. VERDICT A must-buy. Sanford fans will be captivated and will eagerly seek out more Letty Davenport novels.--Ilka Gordon

After more than 30 novels in the Prey series, starring the wily and obliquely funny Minnesota cop Lucas Davenport, and 13 more featuring Davenport's colleague Virgil Flowers, Sandford adds another protagonist to his team, Davenport's 24-year-old stepdaughter, smart-mouthed Letty, here relieved from her dull job as an aide to a DC. politician by an assignment to investigate oil theft in Texas. She's assigned a partner/bodyguard, DHS agent John Kaiser, and as they banter their way across the Texas landscape where "the sun poured down like melted butter," readers are treated to Sandford's well-crafted prose, conversational but never chatty and charged with boisterous humor. A cop surveying a bloody crime scene exults that it's enabled him to connect with the DC. fellow who doles out grant assistance to law enforcement, "for free!" Revelations about oil theft lead to a militia, "hapless goofs with guns," and a spectacular confrontation, automatic weapons and Blackhawks at the Tex-Mex border. A top-line thriller from one of the genre's heavy hitters.

Introduced in 2003's Naked Prey, Letty Davenport, U.S. Marshal Lucas Davenport's adopted daughter, takes center stage in this welcome series spin-off from bestseller Sandford. Letty is bored by her D.C. job working for Senator Christopher Colles, until her unauthorized actions yield proof that two of his staff members stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from the politician's campaign funds. When she resigns her job in the hope of finding something more suited to her thirst for action, Colles, impressed by her initiative, offers her an acceptable alternative. As a member of a committee overseeing the Department of Homeland Security, he's able to hire Letty as a researcher to follow up on reports that a gang of crooks may have stolen hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil in West Texas. Colles fears that the money the thieves made from selling the oil could be funding a national security threat. That original premise, coupled with Sandford's rounded portrayal of Letty as more than just a stock action hero, add up to one of his best books in years. Karen Sisco admirers will hope Letty has a long literary life. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM Partners. (Apr.)

A domestic-terrorist plot gives the adopted daughter of storied U.S. Marshal Lucas Davenport her moment to shine. Veteran oilman Vermilion Wright knows that losing a few thousand gallons of crude is no more than an accounting error to his company but could mean serious money to whomever's found a way to siphon it off from wells in Texas' Permian Basin. So he asks Sen. Christopher Colles, Chair of Homeland Security and Government Affairs, to look into it, and Colles persuades 24-year-old Letty Davenport, who's just quit his employ, to return and partner with Department of Homeland Security agent John Kaiser to track down the thieves. The plot that right-winger Jane Jael Hawkes and her confederates, most of them service veterans with disgruntled attitudes and excellent military skills, have hatched is more dire than anything Wright could have imagined. They plan to use the proceeds from the oil thefts to purchase some black-market C4 essential to a major act of terrorism that will simultaneously express their alarm about the country's hospitality to illegal immigrants and put the Jael-Birds on the map for good. But they haven't reckoned with Letty, another kid born on the wrong side of the tracks who can outshoot the men she's paired with and outthink the vigilantes she finds herself facing--and who, along with her adoptive father, makes a memorable pair of "pragmatists. Really harsh pragmatists" willing to do whatever needs doing without batting an eye or losing a night's sleep afterward. Generations may succeed generations, but Sandford's patented investigation/action formula hasn't aged a whit. Bring it on. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.