Anna Batory's evening starts with a frenzied animal rights raid and then moves quickly to the site of a suicide jump. It's all in a normal night's work for Anna, who leads the Night Crew, a freelance video team out to make a quick buck on sensational footage they can sell to L.A. news stations. But this night is different: the jumper is a teenager named Jacob Harper, and Anna's cameraman Jason beats a strangely hasty exit after filming the jump. A few hours later, Jason too is dead: shot and knifed.

Jacob Harper's father is an attractive former cop who works out the connection between his son's death and Jason's. The two young men share a drug dealer--and when Harper finds said dealer dead as well, he calls Anna to the scene and shows her a creepy knife wound on the dealer's body: the name "Anna" carved into his chest. From that moment on, Anna knows she's chasing down a killer who's got a thing for her--but who is it? A series of heart-thumping encounters between Anna and her shadowy stalker keep this thriller moving at the dizzying clip that Sandford's fans expect.

Those who love the Prey series for the quirks and contradictions of its antihero, Lucas Davenport, will find a kindred creation in Anna: an attractive loner, taciturn and tough-minded, a classical pianist with the fighting reflexes of a wild animal. Will Sandford keep bringing her back? Time will tell. --Barrie Trinkle


From Library Journal
Sandford takes a break from his popular "Prey" series (e.g., Sudden Prey, LJ 4/1/96) with this tale about a freelance video crew that cruises the Los Angeles night in search of newsworthy mayhem.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
This conventional thriller, written in cinematic style, concerns the female head of an independent news video crew whose quest for a murderer takes her through some of the more dangerous and sordid L.A. back alleys. A normally compelling and likeable actor, Sanders is admirably tough; his impersonations are particularly good, especially that of the heroine. But he ignores the author's manipulation of mood and tempo. At times he's puzzlingly laconic, thus dissipating tension. The law of diminishing returns defeats him way before the last side. The listener is finished with the story before he finishes telling it. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Anna Batory is a smart, tough, ambitious video freelanceer whose nightlife consists of riding the mean streets of L.A. with her motley crew of cameramen, looking for hot stories she can tape and sell to the TV station offering the highest bid. One eventful night, she and her crew tape a raid by animal-rights activists, then hurry to the scene of a suicide, where a high-school kid has just jumped off a balcony after a drug overdose. The next morning, one of Anna's crew members turns up dead, sliced, diced, and beaten to a pulp by an obvious madman. Anna hooks up with the dead high-school kid's dad, Jake Harper, a former L.A. cop who wants to avenge his son's death. He and Anna soon find puzzling links between young Harper's death and the death of Anna's crewman. The tension spirals higher as Jake and Anna track down clues, circling ever closer to the killer. Well-orchestrated suspense, nonstop action, plenty of unexpected twists, and a superb climax will keep readers riveted. Sandford, whose Prey series has been a huge commercial success, offers up a feisty new heroine and plenty of human interest in this slick, sleek, nightmarish thriller. Emily Melton


From Kirkus Reviews
The pseudonymous Sandford takes a break from his popular series featuring top Minneapolis cop Lucas Davenport (Sudden Prey, 1996, etc.) to offer a thriller whose gutsy heroine pursues the psychopath who's stalking her around the Los Angeles Basin. A midwestern farm girl whose musical talents proved insufficient to gain her a concert pianist's career, Anna Hatory (now nearing 40) works at an unusual trade. With partner Creek (a gentle giant who did time for running marijuana from Mexico), she heads a television camera crew that prowls L.A. County from midnight until dawn on the lookout for airworthy stories that can be sold to local stations or the networks. Soon after an eventful evening--the freelancers provided exclusive film coverage of the dramatic death of a teenager who jumped from a hotel ledge while high on speed--the body of Jason O'Brien, a part-time videocam operator for Anna who filmed the suicide, washes up on the Santa Monica beach. Anna meets Jake Harper, an ex-sheriff's deputy turned lawyer and the father of the boy who committed suicide. He believes that there's a connection between the deaths of Jason and his son and that Anna may be in danger. After her home is broken into and Creek badly wounded by a pistol-wielding assailant, she joins forces with Jake. Desperate to make a connection that could lead them to her anonymous pursuer, Anna (by now romantically involved with Jake) wonders whether her lost love, a composer who's back on the West Coast courtesy of a UCLA fellowship, might be the guilty party. Instead, a violent climactic confrontation that costs Anna dearly reveals that her manic nemesis is not from the daydreamy past but the nightside present. A credibly gallant woman on the trail of a notably demented weirdo in a host of after-hours venues--a winning and suspense- filled combination for the ultraprofessional Sandford. (Book-of- the-Month Club main selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
A mobile unit of video freelancers prowls the streets to sell the footage they capture to the highest network bidder. It is an exhilarating life. But tonight, two deaths will change everything.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
May 1997

Since John Sandford first captured the attention of millions of readers with his 1989 debut, Rules of Prey, he has written eight books in the bestselling Prey series, featuring Minneapolis cop Lucas Davenport. With each novel in the series, Sandford has proven himself a master of suspense, and his ability to combine rich human drama with edge-of-the-seat suspense has earned him widespread critical acclaim and an ever-growing audience.

Now Sandford presents his fans with a remarkable new heroine in an extraordinary new thriller, The Night Crew. A departure from the Prey series, The Night Crew boasts a whole new cast of characters — and a brand-new level of suspense.

Anna Batory runs the night crew. Small, dark-haired, shy but tough, a Wisconsin farm girl on the streets of Los Angeles, she roams the city with her small band of video freelancers in their truck from ten to dawn, looking for news — accidents, robberies, murders, demonstrations — anything they can shoot and sell to the local stations or the networks. It's an exhilarating life...until two deaths hit Anna close to home.

One night, when Anna's crew is filming a suicide jumper who falls five stories to his death, Jason, her fill-in cameraman, is strangely affected. The next morning, Jason is found murdered on a beach. At first the police think that the deaths are unrelated, but too many coincidences and clues keep linking the deaths and leading back to Anna, revealing the dark truth of an obsessed madman. Through a series of bizarre and harrowing events, ghostsofAnna's past are stirred up and revealed to be intrinsically linked to the lives of Jason and the suicide jumper. Anna's world becomes as cold and dangerous as the night itself.

John Sandford has written thrilling stories before, but nothing to top the extraordinary suspense and tension of The Night Crew. It is an intense ride, and it is Sandford's most chilling novel yet.

bncom

ANNOTATION

A remarkable new character--and an extraordinary new thriller--by the author of the 'Prey' series. Anna Hatory runs the night crew. A Wisconsin farm girl on the streets of L.A., she and her small band of video freelancers roam the city in their truck from ten to dawn, looking for news: accidents, robberies, murders, anything they can sell to the local stations or networks. It's an exhilarating life . . . until the day two deaths shake their world. BOMC Main Selection.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Anna Batory runs the night crew. Small, dark-haired, shy but tough, a Wisconsin farm girl on the streets of Los Angeles, she roams the city with her small band of video free-lancers in their truck from ten to dawn, looking for news: accidents, robberies, murders, demonstrations - anything they can shoot and sell to the local stations or the networks. It's an exhilarating life ... until the day two deaths shake their world. The first is the jumper. Five stories up, perched on the ledge of a hotel window, dark pants, white shirt, just standing there - and then he's gone, falling through the air toward their cameras. The second is Jason, one of Anna's cameramen. Strangely affected by the jumper, he quits the scene early that night, not to be seen again until his body turns up on the beach several hours later, shot in the head. The police wonder if it's drug-related, but Anna isn't so sure, and the more she looks into it on her own, the more the ghosts of the past - hers, Jason's, and finally the jumper's - begin to emerge, until her whole world turns as dark and dangerous as the night itself.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Anna Batory, thin and "rail-hard" with "pale blue killer eyes," runs a small, independent TV-news night crew that peddles clips of crime scenes, fires, car crashes and other mayhem to local TV stations for a tidy profit. As always with Sandford ("Sudden Prey"), the novel opens on action, in this case the crew's taping of a lab break-in by animal-rights activists and of a drug-crazed teenager's jump from a hotel window. The crew moves from voyeurs of the action to unwilling participants when Anna's part-time cameraman is shot dead and mutilated and a friend of his is murdered in an equally grisly manner. It becomes increasingly clear that a psycho is stalking Anna and her crew. To nail him, she teams up with the divorced father of the jumper, lawyer and ex-cop Jake Harper. Anna, Jake and another crew member and his new girlfriend are all attacked by the psycho before the gory finale. The shift from his usual Minneapolis setting to L.A. brings out the noir in Sandford ("the real dawn, a great, unhappy light, like an old piece of newspaper being pushed over the mountains"), and the action and suspense are up to his usual high standard. But Anna is neither as appealing nor as complex as his customary hero, Lucas Davenport, and other characters also seem grey at times, their movements perfunctory. One can't blame Sandford for wanting to try something new after eight "Prey" novels since 1989 ("Sudden Prey", etc.), plus two thrillers under his real name, John Camp, but let's hope we haven't seen the last of Lucas. BOMC main selection

Library Journal

Sandford takes a break from his popular "Prey" series (e.g., Sudden Prey, LJ 4/1/96) with this tale about a freelance video crew that cruises the Los Angeles night in search of newsworthy mayhem.

AudioFile - Thomas J. Miller