John Sandford’s writing manners and dark, realistic, graphic atmosphere reminds me of Chet Williamson and Mo Hayder – which is a big, big praise. Sandford (his real name is John Roswell Camp) is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and a nr. 1 New York Times best-selling author, and for a good reason. He is mostly known from his Prey series, whose protagonist is Lucas Davenport. Buried Prey is the twenty-first instalment of the Prey novels.
On the bundaries of Minneapolis, whilst demolishing old buildings, workers find the dried-up corpses of two young girls buried in the earth under the concrete floor. The bodies were hidden there several years ago. Policemen suspect at once who the girls are: two sisters who went missing in 1985, it was an infamous case. Detective Lucas Davenport in particular remembers all too well the girls’ disappearance from the early days of his career. Back then, he was a young and reckless cop, a ladies’ man and a local hockey player, an undercover man in his first case as a detective. Despite of great efforts made by policemen, they never found the actual perpetrator and never knew what happened to the vanished girls, thus the case was closed. Davenport is afraid that the murderer, still at large, has committed several heinous crimes since then, and this time he has his chance to find the real killer…
Lucas Davenport is definitely my favourite cop character in any kind of thriller/crime/dark fiction series. He is confident, charismatic, unorthodox, lives his life in the fast lane, and has countless romances. However, Davenport should have never ended up married. It makes the character a bit less credible. A tough man is not one who will baby-sit a bunch of children or nurture a wifey. Hopefully John Sandford will have the common sense to get him divorced in the future.
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