The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1)

It took me 7 pages before I first contemplated DNFing this book. John Sandford, an 80-year-old white man who writes the most obnoxiously Mary Sue characters I've ever read (including his "self-insert" Lucas Davenport), has done that once again with Letty Davenport. Letty Davenport is the worst version of a pick-me-girl I've ever read. She does everything exactly like everyone else and yet still thinks she's better than them because her school was in California? She also somehow runs the investigation even though she has zero experience in anything. Just because she somehow seems to know everything?

Letty is 24 years old and is somehow an expert and has all of Lucas's qualities, and gets whatever she wants just because of who her dad is. She pulls the "you can Google my dad if you don't believe me" card way too often for it to be anything other than lazy writing. It seemed as if Sandford didn't want to put any thought into her character. Letty getting whatever she wanted because of who her dad is is just a lazy way of writing a reason for why she's out here doing this dangerous stuff she'd never actually be doing in real life because of her position in the workforce. She isn't even a cop. She works for a Senator. At a desk. Her position in the workforce and the tasks she's doing don't align.

<spoiler>The first chapter of the book follows Letty as she's breaking into the office she works at to get documents she was given clearance to read. All she had to do was walk in and get the paperwork, but she "wanted to be different," I guess, and decided to break into the office. For what? Because she was bored? Shut up, man.

"As a graduate of a heavyweight West Coast university, with a master's degree in something useful, combined with her cool reserve and the way she dressed, Letty Davenport was different." --- This paragraph comes immediately after a paragraph stating that everyone else in that office had also graduated from an Ivy League school, so how is Letty any different?

We are also given insight into a conversation her coworkers have about her workout routine and how expensive her jewelry is and how they'd be set for life if they mugged her. </spoiler> So is this one of those "you either hate her or you love her" things? Because that's another Mary Sue quality I thought we left behind when we were 14 writing poorly-edited fanfiction.

Letty herself is also a contradiction because she states that she "doesn't believe in guns" and thinks the only guns that should exist are single shot shotguns and hunting rifles, but yet she's cackling and excited when she's given a carry permit from the DHS, and owns a bunch of guns that aren't hunting rifles, and also contemplates stealing a .357 from Boxie Blackburn's house when she finds it in his drawer (just because she thinks it would be cool to own one). Her character is nothing like how you see her growing up in Lucas's books, although I will say it was a relief to not hear a gross joke about her and Virgil getting together in this one.

The second time I contemplated DNFing this book was when, 50 pages in, we are informed of Letty's sexual history and how she's thinking about bedding a politician - but he's still a politician so would it even really be worth it? And then we spend countless pages after that with her sizing up every potential bed-mate she encounters after finding dead bodies. I don't know what Sandford's obsession with sex is in these books, but it isn't necessary. I read these books for the mystery and the chase, not to read about how horny all of the characters are, whether sex actually happens or not.

I didn't get my mystery or chase, though, because a whole lot of nothing happens in this book. I was bored, and the slow pacing was almost my third strike for DNFing this book. I gave it the benefit of the doubt, though, considering it is Letty's first book and it is a case where sneaking around and doing nothing seems to be the way to go about it all, but it isn't fun to read a book like that. Especially since I kept rolling my eyes at the characters themselves and how they interacted with each other, because there was absolutely zero character development or depth in this and everyone seemed to be contradicting themselves.

I had already bought the second book in the series, because I was so trusting in Sandford's writing, but I will not be continuing with Letty's series. This book and Dark Angel will both be getting donated.