Buried Prey - John Sandford

When Lucas Davenport was still a uniformed cop in Minneapolis Police Department, he came across a case of missing two young girls. More plainclothes cops were needed, so Lucas was hired temporarily. He worked harder than the others and found a lead to a mysterious man named John Fell. The other cops focused their search on a homeless guy which ended with the guy’s death. Case was closed although the missing girls had not been found. Lucas was not satisfied, but he couldn’t work alone. His boss, Daniel Quentin, who had political ambitions, was happy with his work and Lucas was permanently made into a plainclothes and given new cases. Soon John Fell had been forgotten.

Years later, a contractor found the bodies of the two girls, buried in a concrete basement. Again Lucas was drawn to the case, feeling guilty why he had given up then. Now he determined to find John Fell, believed that Fell had had more victims.

I liked this book very much because it told Lucas’s early years in MPD. It didn’t really make sense though, how he never visited his mother, who suffered breast cancer. She was the only relative he had, it seemed, or he was more a loner than I had thought. He reminded me of Tintin (by Hergé), who was also an orphan. (Tintin has a loyal dog, though, and Lucas doesn't.) Young Lucas couldn’t do whatever he liked back then. Every time he got a lead, he couldn't follow it and had to share with others, or at least to his boss, who didn’t like to be called at midnight at home. Now Lucas was a boss in the BCA, with his own secretary, researcher, detectives, and thugs; he could even decide which cases he wanted to take.

=Back at the BCA, Lucas called John Simon, the director, and told him what was happening. Simon had almost no control over Lucas’s unit, and resented it, but lived with it.=

Here he also worked on this case by his own will, although in the end his boss took the glory because John Fell was a serial killer after all.