Broken Prey by John Sandford

The first body is that of a woman.  She has been left displayed, her naked body scourged by something like a wire flail.  Lucas Davenport gets a bad feeling about the crime as soon as he sees it, a feeling shared by his counterpart Sloan.  Sloan is about to retire and he doesn't want a major crime in his last days to investigate.  The second body is that of a young father and his son.  Again the man's body has been displayed and whipped.

Davenport gets his team together and they start to investigate whether other crimes have occurred and somehow flown under the radar.  As the body count starts to mount, the seasoned investigators realize that the crimes mimic those of some of the worst killers they have encountered in the past.  Those men are all still in prison.  Is their a copycat killer and if so, how does this new killer have all the details of the past?

The investigation moves to the prison and interviews are held with the men Davenport and Sloan have put away.  They leave convinced that the killers have coached someone to kill as they did, but who?  Is it a former prisoner?  A prison guard or other staff member?  A visitor?  As the investigation becomes more focused, the bodies continue to come and the plot moves through twists and turns.

This is the sixteenth Lucas Davenport novel.  Lucas' wife, Weather, is in London during this book with the couple's children on a surgical exchange.  Lucas is left to his own devices, pushing himself longer and harder than he usually does as there is no brake on his actions.  The plot is full of twists and the reader will be hard pressed to guess the ending.  This book is recommended for mystery readers.