Night Crew

John Sandford

Anna Batory is the manager and leader of the Night Crew, a free lance video team who films news stories at night and sells them to local television news stations in the Los Angeles area. When they are lucky, they sell their footage to the national feeds as well. Tonight she has a tip of an animal rights activist group planning a raid on a lab to free the test animals. They pick up Jason, one of the part time videographers. As the raid is being finished by the police, Anna receives another call about a possible suicide jumper only blocks from their current position. They arrive in time to film the teen from the time he waivered in the open window until he hit the pavement. He had been high rather than suicidal. Right after they finish filming, Jason leaves quickly, unsettled by the jumper.

The next day Anna receives a phone call from the police. Could she identify a body? The man had her card on him as a contact person. She responds, afraid it is Creek, her friend and co-manager of the Night Crew. It is Jason. He has been murdered.

The jumper's father, Jacob Harper, seeks Anna out. He wants to track down his son's dealer. It turns out the dealer was also Jason's dealer. By the time they find him, he, too, is dead. The dealer has the name "Anna" scratched into his chest. Anna has a stalker/serial killer after her and the people around her. Jacob stays with Anna as they work with the police to catch a killer before the killer catches someone else, especially Anna.

Besides being a thriller, Night Crew is a look at the world of news and free lance viceographing. I hadn't thought about all the different ways television stations could get their news stories. This Night Crew roams around the Los Angeles area listening to the police scanner hoping to be on site before another team or a television news group arrives. They make a good living at what they do.

John Sandford has a spooky antogonist in this novel - a duo personality individual who has one side who "loves" Anna and the other who detests her for spurning him. She hasn't realized she has spurned him; she doesn't even know who he is. The relationship between Jacob and Anna grows quickly. Their feelings at the end of the novel are realistic and unexpected to those of us who like everything tied up nicely. Night Crew is a pleasing thriller, although not overly gripping. It was easy for me to put it down to come back to later.