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The Hanged Man's Song

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Overview

John Sandford author of the phenomenal Prey novels returns with The Hanged Man's Song.

Editorial Reviews

The fourth installment in Sandford's Kidd series finds Kidd's genius hacker friend Bobby brutally murdered and Bobby's laptop missing. Kidd, both an artist and a hacker himself, and his fellow thief/sometime lover LuEllen team up to locate the laptop and the murderer. Along the way, the action moves from St. Paul to Mississippi to Washington, DC, with chases, crooked politicians, identity theft, and plenty of peeks into the worlds of burglary and computer hacking. Mix in exciting characters, retribution, conspiracy, rekindled romance, and brisk action, and this novel is a winner, a thriller enhanced by an enjoyable and entertaining narration by Richard Ferrone. Highly recommended.-Denise A. Garofalo, Astor Home for Children, Rhinebeck, NY Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of John Sandford

Like the best writers in this genre--Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain among them--John Sandford evokes his netherworld with authentic dialogue and meticulous details."--Minneapolis Star Tribune John Sandford is the pseudonym of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp. Camp was born in 1944 and was raised in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He received his B.A. in American Studies from the University of Iowa, and received his first training as a journalist and reporter when he was in Korea for 15 months working for his base paper. After the army, Camp spent 10 months working for the Cape Girardeau Se Missourian newspaper before returning to the University of Iowa for his Masters in Journalism. From 1971 to 1978, he worked as a general assignment reporter for the Miami Herald, covering killings and drug cases, among other beats, with his colleague, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edna Buchanan. In 1978, Camp joined the St. Paul Pioneer Press as a features reporter. He became a daily columnist at the newspaper in 1980. In the same year, he was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for an article he wrote on the Native American communities in Minnesota and North Dakota and their modern day social problems. In 1986, Camp won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for a series of articles on the farm crisis in the Midwest. Camp has written fourteen books in the bestselling "Prey" series under the name John Sandford. The titles in this series, which features Lucas Davenport, include Rules of Prey, Shadow Prey, Eyes of Prey, Silent Prey, Winter Prey, Night Prey, Mind Prey, Sudden Prey, Secret Prey, Certain Prey, Easy Prey, Chosen Prey, Naked Prey, Broken Prey, Invisible Prey, and now, Phantom Prey. With the "Prey" series, Sandford has displayed a brilliance of characterization and pace that has earned him wide praise and made the books national bestsellers. He has been hailed as a "born storyteller" (San Diego Tribune), his work as "the kind of trimmed-to-the-bone thriller you can't put down" (Chicago Tribune), and Davenport as "one of the most engaging (and iconoclastic) characters in contemporary fiction." (Detroit News)

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Additional Info

Imprint

Penguin Group E-Books

Filesize

592.40 KB

Number of Pages

352

eBook ISBN

9780786574254

Excerpt from: The Hanged Man's Song by John Sandford

Chapter One

>>>NOW THE BLACK MAN screamed No!, now the black man shouted, Get out, motherfucker, and Carp, a big-boy at thirty, felt the explosion behind his eyes.

Tantrum.

They were in the black man's neatly kept sick-house, his infirmary. Carp snatched the green oxygen cylinder off its stand, felt the weight as he swung it overhead. The black man began to turn in his wheelchair, his dark eyes coming around through the narrow, fashionable glasses, the gun turning, the gun looking like a toy.

And now it goes to slo-mo, the sounds of the house fading -- the soprano on public radio, fading; the rumble of a passing car, fading; the hoarse, angry words from the black man, fading to inaudible gibberish; and the black man turning, and the gun, all in slo-mo, the sounds fading as time slowed down. . . .

Then lurching to fast forward:

"HAIYAH!" James Carp screamed it, gobs of spit flying, one explosive syllable, and he swung the steel cylinder as hard as he could, as though he were spiking a football.

The black man's skull shattered and the black man shouted a death-shout, a HUH! that came at once with the WHACK! of the cylinder smashing bone.

The black man spun out of his wheelchair, blood flying in a crimson spray. A .25-caliber automatic pistol skittered out of his fingers and across the red-and-blue oriental carpet into a corner; the wheelchair crashed into a plaster wall, sounding as though somebody had dropped an armful of pipes.

Time slowed again. The quiet sounds came back: the soprano, the cars, an airplane, a bird, and the black man: almost subliminally, the air squeezed out of his dying lungs and across his vocal cords, producing not a moan, but a drawn-out vowel oooohhhh . . .

Blood began to seep from the black man's close-cut hair into the carpet. He was a pile of bones wrapped in a blue shirt.

>>> CARP stood over him, sweating, shirt stuck to his broad back, breathing heavily, angry adrenaline burning in his blood, listening, hearing nothing but the rain ticking on the tin roof and the soprano in the unintelligible Italian opera; smelling the must and the old wood of the house tainted by the coppery odor of blood. He was pretty sure he knew what he'd done but he said, "Get up. C'mon, get up."

The black man didn't move and Carp pushed the skinny body with a foot, and the body, already insubstantial, shoulders and legs skeletal, small skull like a croquet ball, flopped with the slackness of death. "Fuck you," Carp said. He tossed the oxygen cylinder on a couch, where it bounced silently on the soft cushions.

A car turned the corner. Carp jerked, stepped to a window, split the blinds with an index finger, and looked out at the street. The car kept going, splashing through a roadside puddle.

Breathing even harder, now. He looked around, for other eyes, but there was nobody in the house but him and the black man's body. Fear rode over the anger, and Carp's body told him to run, to get away, to put this behind him, to pretend it never happened; but his brain was saying, Take it easy, take it slow.