John Sandford's badass young investigator goes undercover

Cover image of "Dark Angel," a novel in which Letty Davenport goes undercover

In a series of 36 crime novels to date, John Sandford has traced the career of crack investigator Lucas Davenport for four decades. Marketed under the “Prey” umbrella, the books follow Davenport from his time in Minnesota, first on the city’s police force, then in a senior role in the fictional Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and finally as a US Marshall. But in the 14th Prey novel we meet 12-year-old Letty, whom Davenport and his wife will soon adopt. And a dozen years later she emerges on the job in her own right in The Investigator. Now, one year after her star turn as an agent of the Department of Homeland Security, she’s off on an even more consequential assignment. In Dark Angel, Letty Davenport goes undercover to infiltrate a shadowy group of hackers who have taken down the Russian railroad network with a ransomware attack.

Introducing the series’ principal characters

Dark Angel introduces us to several characters who promise to appear regularly in subsequent books in the series. And, of course, we get to know Letty herself better along the way.

Letty had worked on the Washington staff of US Senator Christopher Colles (R-Fla). And when she announced her plan to quit, bored by the routine, he set her up as an investigator for the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security. He remains in the picture as chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and her real boss.
John Kaiser is a tough “ex–Delta operator who’d gone undercover in several different Middle Eastern countries, as well as Sweden and Canada.” He partnered with her on her first assignment for the DHS. John joins the action in Dark Angel, too.
Barbara Cartwright, who works for an Unspecified Agency that is obviously the CIA, befriends Letty and will become her partner in this new adventure. She is “seven years older than Letty, but they might have been sisters.” Like Letty, she is a crack shot with both pistols and rifles.
Barbara arranges for Letty to join the Washington Ladies Peace-Maker Society. It’s a group of gun-toting women who work in the Washington, DC area for the federal government. They meet regularly at a gun range, where they show off their skills. Barbara and Letty prove to be the best shots of all.

In Dark Angel, the NSA assigns a brilliant hacker named Rod Baxter to partner with Letty. He reluctantly plays a central role in the action and may or may not reappear in future books in the Letty Davenport series.

Dark Angel (Letty Davenport #2) by John Sandford (2023) 384 pages ★★★★★

Photographic montage suggesting Russian hacker at work like their American counterparts in this novel about how Letty Davenport goes undercover — Most of us are familiar with news about ransomware attacks by Russian and North Korean hackers. But in John Sandford’s novels, a group of American hackers has turned the tables on the Russians. And their work threatens Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Image: S-RM

As the action unfolds, Russian agents intervene

At first, DHS and the NSA have led Letty and Rod to believe that their job is to prevent a California-based hacker collective from launching a major ransomware attack on the Twin Cities. They’re aware that the group, called Ordinary People, had successfully pulled off a multimillion-dollar attack on the Russians. What they’re not counting on is that the Russians aren’t willing to take the insult lying down. Working with a criminal syndicate, agents of Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, enter the picture in California. Naturally, they will tangle with Letty and her crew. And all this takes place against the background of Vladimir Putin’s attempt to annex the whole of Ukraine.

Summary of the novel by my favorite AI chatbot

In recent reviews, I’ve turned to Claude-AI to summarize text. Its performance has been consistently flawless, with only one minor error. This time is a little different. In the following, I’ve had to correct several errors, deleting some of the AI’s prose and inserting some of my own [in brackets]. I’ve also added subheads to break up the text.

A dangerous undercover assignment

Dark Angel is the second novel in John Sandford’s Letty Davenport series, featuring the twenty-something adopted daughter of Lucas Davenport, the protagonist of Sandford’s popular Prey series. After her impressive performance in a Texas gunfight and her exceptional firearms skills draw government attention, Letty is recruited for a dangerous undercover assignment by the Department of Homeland Security and the NSA.

The mission centers on a hacker collective called Ordinary People who threaten to take over Minneapolis’s power grid, putting thousands of lives at risk. Letty, posing as [the partner of] a rogue programmer for hire, her reluctant NSA partner Rod Baxter, [she] travels to Los Angeles to infiltrate the group. The contrast between Letty’s action-oriented personality and Baxter’s more cerebral approach creates an engaging dynamic as they navigate the dangerous world of elite hackers.

Misleading guidance from the DHS and the NSA

As the investigation progresses, the team is reinforced by CIA operative Barbara Cartwright and DHS investigator John Kaiser, Letty’s partner from her first adventure. They get close to Craig Sovern, a prominent member of Ordinary People who has been attacking [the Russian] railroad system and plans [what the NSA tells her is to be an attack on the Twin Cities]. The plot takes a complex turn when Letty and her team begin to suspect that Ordinary People’s activities might actually be serving important purposes. [This new understanding leads] them to shift from trying to dismantle the organization to protecting it from Russian agents.

The novel explores contemporary themes of cybersecurity, international espionage, and the murky ethics of modern intelligence work. Set against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the story examines how the hackers’ activities have put them in the crosshairs of both the U.S. government and Russian elite forces. Throughout the fast-paced thriller, Sandford balances intense action sequences with humor and character development, as Letty continues to grow into her role as a government operative while learning from more experienced operatives around her.

About the author

Photo of John Sandford, author of this novel about how Letty Davenport goes undercover — *John Roswell Camp, aka John Sandford. Image: Evan Frost – MPR News*

The author writes on his website that “John Sandford is the pseudonym of John Roswell Camp, an American author and journalist. Camp won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 1986 and was one of four finalists for the prize in 1980. He also was the winner of the Distinguished Writing Award of the American Society of Newspaper Editors for 1985.

“Camp is the author of fifty-four published novels, as of the summer of 2022 [and fifty-eight as of this review], all of which have appeared, in one format or another, on the New York Times best-seller lists, many debuting at #1. In addition to the Prey, Virgil Flowers and Letty Davenport novels, all part of the Prey universe, he is also the co-author of three young-adult books . . . written with Michele Cook, and co-author of the science-fiction thriller Saturn Run with Ctein.

“He is the author of two non-fiction books, one on art . . . and one on plastic surgery.”

Camp was born in 1944 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and earned a BA in American history and literature and a master’s in journalism, both from the University of Iowa. He lives in New Mexico, having made the Twin Cities his home for many years.

For the launch of this new series featuring Lucas Davenport’s daughter, see The Investigator – Letty Davenport #1 (Taking down a sinister Right-Wing militia).

I’ve reviewed a great many of the Lucas Davenport novels in Sandford’s longest-running series. The most recent are Masked Prey – Prey #30 (John Sandford’s millionaire investigator takes on the alt-right) and Righteous Prey – Prey #32 (Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers battle a murder conspiracy). You can find all the others by typing his name in the search box at the top of the Home Page. I’ve also reviewed all the books about Davenport’s most enterprising agent at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension at John Sandford’s excellent Virgil Flowers novels.