Deadline recently announced that Amazon MGM Studios have greenly an adaption of the first novel in John Sandford‘s Lucas Davenport/Prey series: Rules of Prey. The show will star Jensen Ackles (Supernatural, The Boys, etc.) in the lead role. The eight-episode first season will stream on MGM+. (Not sure if that’s available in Canada, but hopefully it’ll be available on Prime at least…)
Here’s how Nellie Andreeva describes the show’s premise, in the Deadline piece:
“Created by Bruce Terris (DTF St. Louis), who serves as showrunner and executive producer, Rules of Prey follows Lucas Davenport (Ackles), formerly a detective in the Minneapolis Police Department, drawn out of seclusion back into law enforcement to investigate a series of confounding murders designed to send a message specifically to him. When an ingenious serial killer begins murdering Minneapolis citizens, Davenport, a brilliant polymath and unconventional investigator, takes the case, sparking an intense psychological duel with an equally intelligent adversary. As Davenport deciphers the killer’s twisted moral code and personal vendetta, he must match wits with a predator operating by his own rules of justice, risking everything to stop a killer who sees their conflict as the ultimate game.”
The novel, first published in 1989, is available in North America via G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Based on that description above, there is a slight deviation from the novel, in which Davenport was very much “still” a lieutenant in the Minneapolis PD. Here’s the novel’s official synopsis:
The killer was mad but brilliant.
He left notes with every woman he killed. Rules of murder: Never have a motive. Never follow a discernible pattern. Never carry a weapon after it has been used… So many rules to his sick, violent games of death.
But Lucas Davenport, the cop who’s out to get him, isn’t playing by the rules.
With any luck, the adaptation will follow a similar approach to Prime’s Bosch, Cross, and Reacher shows; each of which has taken a highly-popular, well-established crime series, brought earlier stories up-to-date, and breathed fresh life into them, while retaining what made the books stand out and so popular.
G.P. Putnam’s Sons have published all of Sandford’s Davenport, Virgil Flowers, and Kidd novels, as well as a host of others; the series is published in the UK by Simon & Schuster.
If you’ve been following CR for any length of time, you’ll no doubt have seen that I am a long-time, big fan of John Sandford’s novels. In fact, I’ve read all but five of them — the missed books are the second through sixth of the Lucas Davenport series. When I first discovered his work, I lived in the UK, where few of his earliest novels were available; the first six Prey books, all of the Kidd & LuEllen novels, and a couple of the stand-alones weren’t published in the UK. The first Davenport novel I read (back in 2004) was, if I recall correctly, Certain Prey, which kicked off a decade of excellent, enjoyable reading.
Last year, I re-read Sandford’s four Kidd novels, which were published between 1992-2003, far less frequently than the Prey/Davenport novels, which were published annually. (Characters from the all of Sandford’s series have a tendency to make appearances in others.) It was interesting to be able to see how the author’s writing improved and changed over time.
Given the adaptation announcement, I think I’m going to take this opportunity to go back and start the series from the beginning, re-read Rules of Prey, and then read the books I haven’t yet, as a quasi-CR20-style piece.
Some trivia: Sandford wrote and sold The Fool’s Run before he wrote and sold Rules of Prey, to different publishers. However, Putnam’s fast-tracked the Davenport novel so it came out before The Fool’s Run, but had to publish it under a pseudonym (Sandford), as the publisher of the Kidd novel has the “rights” to his real name (Camp).
The next novel in the series is Ruthless Prey (#37), which is due to be published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in North America, on March 30th, 2027.
Also on CR: Reviews of Phantom Prey, Wicked Prey, Storm Prey, Buried Prey, Stolen Prey, Silken Prey, Field of Prey, Golden Prey, Neon Prey, Masked Prey, Righteous Prey, Judgement Prey, Toxic Prey, Lethal Prey, Revenge Prey, Dark of the Moon, The Investigator, and Dark Angel
