Have you read any of Sandford’s books?
I’m wondering about the “Prey” series too - any recommends?
Read most of them. Harmon doesn’t look like the way I visualize Davenport. Too thin, too handsome, too California. Daviport is a midwesterner.
All of them.....
One notable thing about Sandford's books is that characters from the first book in a series develop and appear in subsequent books. Some traits about them are consistent and the traits and characteristics that change don't simply change. Changes are either explained or occur because of events in one book, and then carry over into the next book.
Lucas Davenport is a former University of Minnesota hockey player. Distinguishing characteristics include a scar that cuts across one eyebrow from a fishing leader, and a nose that's been broken several times. Mark Harmon isn't stocky or physical enough to play Lucas Davenport of the literary series.
As for Certain Prey's professional assassin, Clara Rinker, she's a stone-cold killer, but a country girl from an abusive past. Rinker appears in at least two "Prey" books. The sophisticated woman I see in the commercials isn't true to the former redneck bar stripper Clara Rinker.
I enjoy Sandford's Prey books a great deal. They're set in Minnesota, and Davenport's first a police detective, then later an agent with the more political Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, who gets a little more physical than is permitted by the rules. He has a tendency to shoot people or bust them up. Contrary to the post above, Sandford describes different firearms - not everything's an assault rifle. Rinker uses a .22 for a lot of her killings, and there's a discussion of why she uses it. Davenport made a fortune with a role-playing computer simulation and is a clothes horse who drives a Porsche - and catches crap for it. What helps make the books is the descriptions of life in Minnesota and the cast of characters that continue from book to book.
In addition to the twenty "Prey" novels, there are four older "Kidd" novels, which feature an artist/computer hacker and cat burglar/sometimes girlfriend. They're decent books, but technology became too complicated for Sandford to continue writing them.
"Dead Watch" is a single outlier, a political thriller, that didn't do much for me.
From the cast of characters surrounding Davenport, Sandford pulled Virgil Flowers ('that f**kin' Flowers', as everyone refers to him), a single, surfer-looking, cowboy boot-wearing, independent-band-t-shirt-wearing, agent who handles hard cases in a large area of southwest Minnesota.
Flowers has an interest in women and they, in them. Flowers was raised as a preacher's kid and often quotes apropos Biblical verses; he pulls a fishing boat behind his 4Runner while on cases, because he loves to fish and writes for outdoor journals. He hates firearms and his handgun is usually locked under the seat of his car; but he winds up grabbing a shotgun or something. His manner of solving cases consists of letting everyone in small towns know what evidence he's finding, then following the leads as everyone reacts. I think we're on the fifth F**kin' Flowers book - and they are clear winners.
You're going to read a lot about Minnesota - what the farmhouses are like; how July differs from November; bachelor farmers; how to winterize a fishing boat . . . but the books are good reads and the characters are well-developed.