Kidd

About the Kidd series

Kidd is a painter and elite freelance computer hacker in John Sandford's earliest series, launched the same year as Prey with The Fool's Run (1989) but told in a very different register — closer to a heist thriller than a police procedural, following Kidd and his partner LuEllen as they take on jobs that mix high-stakes computer intrusion with old-fashioned con artistry. Where Lucas Davenport works inside the law (however loosely), Kidd operates entirely outside it, giving Sandford room to write caper-thriller plotting rather than a straight investigation.

The series ran across a wide span — a large gap separates The Empress File (1991) from The Devil's Code (2000) — and stayed prescient about computer crime and hacking culture well ahead of most 1990s thrillers. It wrapped with The Hanged Man's Song (2003). Readers who enjoy Prey's plotting but want a hacker-and-heist flavor instead of a police procedural are the natural audience.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with The Fool's Run (1989). Kidd and LuEllen's partnership develops across the four books, and there's a significant real-world time gap (1991 to 2000) that the story itself reflects, so reading in sequence is recommended.