Just Finished Reading John Sandford's Gathering Prey

When I'm browsing the shelves to find an interesting book to read, I am usually careful to find out whether or not it is "down the line" as part of a series.  Unfortunately, I was careless about doing this recently when I checked out the John Sandford novel Gathering Prey from my local public library...I had read into it a bit until it became very clear to me that this book was part of a series...in this case, the 25th installment in Sandford's Prey series that he began in 1989 and consistently has produced new stories almost annually since.  This series has as chief protagonist Lucas Davenport, an unorthodox-but-sympathetic crime investigator who in the book I just read is employed by the state of Minnesota as an investigator/consultant.  He has an young adult daughter (adopted), Letty, the two of them sharing the lead in investigating a group of wandering, sadistic cultists that the author seems to have modeled largely after the Charles Manson gang of the late 1960s.  The phenomenon of the culture of "Travelers", nomadic people who live sparingly as they move from place to place, is also examined, with two of them, Skye and Henry, finding themselves crossing paths with that cult group as they move from California on through Oregon and eventually to South Dakota, where a pivotal confrontation ensues.  The setting continues eastward to Minnesota...where the Davenports live in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area (Letty is home from college)...and then to Wisconsin and finally to Michigan's sparsely-populated Upper Peninsula.  There is a lot of action in this story, and I think I've gone as far as I can to present its background without giving it all away...

I liked Gathering Prey, taking into account that it is popular crime/mystery fiction and that there is a lot of gratuitous violence as well as law enforcement tending to go over the line regarding their handling of suspects and witnesses...especially when it comes to questioning them.  I've already experienced this with the Women's Murder Club series by James Patterson, so I've come to expect it in other series of this genre.  But that having been noted, I did like Lucas and Letty, a good sign that I'll probably be delving back into this series...albeit starting from book #1.  Although Gathering Prey is part of a long series and the personal lives of the characters develop from book to book, the main story is itself self-contained and I could choose to ignore brief references made to earlier stories.  It's good reading entertainment and little more...sometimes that's all I want from a book, though...