By Jim Knippenberg
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The amazing thing about John Sandford is that even when he's not at his best, and he's not in Hidden Prey, he's still better than most. Still one of the best there is at police procedurals.

Review Hidden Prey

By John Sandford G.P. Putnam's Sons, $26.95 400 pages

Like all Prey novels - this is his 16th - it stars Lucas Davenport, former Twin Cities detective, now an investigator with Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a statewide agency that takes over when local cops request help.

Kicking him off the Twin Cities force was a smart move on Sandford's part because it makes the entire state Davenport's hunting ground - more grisly murders, more depravity, more truly hideous characters to track down. Hidden, for example, takes him from Minneapolis to Duluth to a gaggle of cities East of Nowhere. Nice little travelogue, that.

His prey this time is a cell of Russian spies - led by a 90-something-year-old Grandpa, of all things - that has been inactive since the Cold War. They're living in Duluth and trying to protect their secret. "Protecting their secret" translates to killing people who are on to them: the Russian sailor who may or may not be a foreign agent; the street person who may or may not have witnessed the sailor's murder.

You know from the very start that Carl is the killer. He one of the book's best characters, a high school senior reared by Grandpa (actually his great-grandfather) to be a hired killer.

Carl is complex and well drawn, a curious mix of teenage boy concerns - as in charging hormones, identity confusion - and killer instincts.

All this leaves him torn between growing up, loyalty to Grandpa and a growing sense of guilt over the murders.

Not so with Grandpa, the book's other superbly drawn character - no remorse, no regrets, no feeling for anything, really, except for his disabled wife and grandson Carl.

Where Sandford stumbles is in trying to make us believe any of this really matters. With the Cold War a distant memory, would anyone care if someone was a former spy? Heck, it would probably be a plus, making for much better poker night yarn spinning.

The Russian government, of course, cares a great deal. That's why it sends Nadezhda Kalin, a spy masquerading as a Russian cop and having a terrible time with English, creating a communications gap that makes for some great one-liners.

Oh, and Nadezhda's beautiful and a little bit easy, so you get some pretty snappy sexual tension between her and any number of law enforcement types.

But not with Davenport - he's now married to Weather and has a year-old son.

Davenport isn't at the top of his game here, either.

His detecting skills are just fine, as always, but he seems to be going through the motions. Not much passion there. Likewise, there aren't as many of his "just this side of illegal" methods going on.

Where Sandford excels is in his picture of police work - the mountain of false leads, the constantly changing direction of an investigation, the minutiae that probably isn't important needs to be tracked down anyway. The step-by-step process of an investigation is presented here in excruciating detail.

Now, if he could only make us care about a bunch of geriatric spies.

E-mail jknippenberg@enquirer.com