I take it you didn't care for Cussler all that much? Some people like him, some think he's silly. I think he's silly but like him, anyway.

I've pretty much listed most of what I consider throwaway literature that I like. One of the ones I didn't list was Dean Koontz, who is hit or miss for me. I've read about 8 of his books, and liked about half of them, and thought the other half would have been better left unwritten. You mentioned John Sandford's Prey series. I read the first three or four of them 10 years ago or so and lost interest. They had to be at least decent or I wouldn't have bought any more, but I just looked through one of them that is sitting on my bookshelf, Night Prey, and couldn't remember a single thing from it, so they obviously didn't make much of an impression. If I were you, when I was done with Connelly and Grisham, I'd look at Koontz and see what you think of him, or if you really like Connelly, maybe Ed McBain or one of the other crime fiction guys. I think I read one Ed McBain book and thought it was fair, but not as good as Connelly.

I had never read any crime fiction until Connelly, and after reading through all his books then in print (this was about 2000, so he had maybe 5 or 6 books out), I went through a lot of crime fiction writers, Raymond Chandler (good in a way, but dated), McBain (wooden), Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason books, and fair), some Edgar Wallace (Recommend just for the history of it, but I didn't think he was any good :/), Dashiell Hammit (sp?), who wrote the Maltese Falcon or the Big Sleep (can't remember which and always mix them up because both films starred Humphrey Bogart) -- I read a lot fo the stuff. It was an interesting exercise from the standpoint of seeing how the genre evolved, particularly how sex and violence became more overt, but as entertaining literature, I wouldn't recommend most of this stuff, because on its own I didn't think much of it was remarkable. It is interesting to see how the change in those books reflects the change in our society's standards of what was fit to print, though, how they became so much more incredibly violent and perverse.