Sandford does a good job of describing difficult scenes in the way that the original Psycho movie let the viewer know another murder was taking place. You never actually saw the murder but you could infer that it was happening from the music and the indirect visuals. Sandford writes in a similar way and takes the reader up to but not into the actual scene where any additional detail would be overly disturbing. Hence, the reader is left to their own imagination to fill in the blanks.
The bad guy in this novel is a crazy gamer and former psychiatric patient, John Mail. He has some issues with his old psychiatrist, who is female, and takes out an elaborate revenge on her. The good guy in all of the Prey novels, Lucas Davenport, is back in style and Davenport fans will be satiated yet again.