Abandoned by Booklikes

So I can't talk about this book without spoilers. That's how freaking annoyed I am. I may just give up reading anymore books in this series or ensuring they are library borrows. Lucas is not the end all be all for women everywhere. The fact that Sandford cheapens Marcy's death by forgetting her backstory and having her thinking about Lucas in a someday romantic style made me heave. And then of course everyone is not focused on Marcy. Oh hell no, everyone must be focused on preventing Lucas from murdering the serial pedophile murderer since everyone knows that he loved Marcy and must get his revenge. His freaking teenage daughter even talks to him about making sure he gets revenge. This book was a hot mess after we leave the "before" timeline and go back to the "present" timeline. That book ends in a whimpering mess.

"Buried Prey" starts off strong. We have Lucas standing by when the bodies of two young missing girls are found. These girls were the first case of a serial killer (he doesn't know that yet) that Lucas worked on as a cop back in 1985. This case had initially haunted Lucas, but he put it away. Now though he hopes to find the man who killed these girls. 

Sandford takes a different approach here. We follow Lucas back in 1985 (he sucked) and how he met some people we know now. And then we go back to the present day with Lucas working the case. We also get third person POVs of the serial killer and with Marcy. We only get Marcy for a bit though and then it becomes apparent why. Sandford decides to follow the age old formula of fridging a woman for a male character's development. Yes I booed long and hard on it. Heck if Sandford wanted it to hurt readers, he should have killed off Weather or even Letty (I would have cheered).

I am annoyed about the fridging for a variety of reasons. First, it makes zero sense that Marcy would be traveling solo. Second, Sandford in the last book had shown us that Marcy was married and had a toddler named James. In this one, Marcy is still single, not finding the one, and still thinking about Lucas. She even muses about getting with him again if something should happen to Weather. Third, Marcy ceases to matter after being murdered. Her death is an inconvenience because with her dead, Lucas may do something really really bad and that's the last 1/3 of the freaking book. People talking about Lucas and trying to prevent him from killing a serial killer. Though Sandford throws in a scene there with Letty asking Lucas how is he going to get the guy and kill him. I 100 percent hate this character. 

In the end though things don't matter. Lucas decides he's going to try to choke a guy out who has a gun and it causes one of his friends to shoot the guy and then he's dead. I mean forget the fact that he murdered and raped little girls. the most important thing is that Lucas isn't going to go to jail for killing him.

Sandford could have done so much more with this book. We don't even have Lucas following up with the parents in the present day. That would have been nice to see how their marriage fell apart after losing their kids. Maybe they would have blamed Lucas or the police for what happened. We could have had more heart in this one. The girls and the other victims felt like after thoughts.