John Sandford

John Sandford is the pen name of John Roswell Camp, an American novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning former journalist best known for the long-running Prey series featuring Minnesota investigator Lucas Davenport. Beginning with Rules of Prey in 1989, the series follows Davenport from a state investigator who moonlights as a video-game designer to a senior officer with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, tracking killers across dozens of increasingly character-driven thrillers.

Before turning to fiction, Camp spent years as a newspaper reporter and columnist, winning the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1986 for a series on a Minnesota farm crisis -- an eye for procedural detail and regional texture that carried straight into his novels. He writes under the Sandford name to keep the fiction distinct from his journalism, and has since expanded well beyond Prey with the related Virgil Flowers series and the Letty Davenport spin-off following Lucas's adopted daughter.

A new reader should start with Rules of Prey, which introduces Davenport and the taut, dual-viewpoint structure -- alternating killer and investigator chapters -- that defines the whole series. There is no film or TV adaptation; the Prey novels remain one of crime fiction's steadiest print franchises, with a new entry most years since the series began.