"Virgil knows the town of Trippton, Minnesota, a little too well. A few years back, he investigated the corrupt -- and as it turned out, homicidal -- local school board, and now the town's back in view with more alarming news: A woman's been found dead, frozen in a block of ice. There's a possibility that it might be connected to a high school class of twenty years ago that has a mid-winter reunion coming up, and so, wrapping his coat a little tighter,...

"Wheatfield, Minnesota: a metropolis of six hundred souls and change, for which the word "moribund" might have been invented. Nothing ever happened there and nothing ever would--until the mayor of sorts (campaign slogan: "I'll Do What I Can") and his precocious teenage buddy come up with a scheme to put Wheatfield on the map. Should something dramatic occur--say, that the apparition of the Virgin Mary miraculously appeared at the local Catholic Church--the...

"At the local state university, two feuding departments have faced off on the battleground of PC culture. Each carries their views to extremes that may seem absurd, but highly educated people of sound mind and good intentions can reasonably disagree, right? Then someone winds up dead, and Virgil Flowers is brought in to investigate...and he soon comes to realize he's dealing with people who, on this one particular issue, are functionally crazy. Among...

Virgil Flowers was brought into the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension by a promise from Lucas Davenport: "We'll only give you the hard stuff." He's been doing the hard stuff for three years, but he's never seen anything like this. In the small rural town of Bluestem, an old man is bound in his basement, doused with gasoline, and set on fire. This is the third murder in just as many weeks, and it's becoming clear that Flowers has stepped into a killer's...

Whenever you hear the sky rumble, that usually means a storm. In Virgil Flowers' case, make that two. The first storm comes from, of all places, the Minnesota Zoo. Two large, and very rare, Amur tigers have vanished from their cage, and authorities are worried sick that they've been stolen for their body parts. Traditional Chinese medicine prizes those parts for home remedies, and people will do extreme things to get what they need. Some of them are...

While competing in a fishing tournament in a remote area of northern Minnesota, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers gets a call from Lucas Davenport to investigate a murder at a nearby resort, where a woman has been shot while kayaking. The more he digs, the more he discovers the arrows of suspicion that point in many directions--then he finds that this is not the first murder, that there was a second, seemingly unrelated...

Summoned by Lucas Davenport to investigate a pair of murders in which the victims are found with lemons in their mouths, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers struggles to find a connection that could prevent additional killings.

"Alex Sand was spending the evening at home playing basketball with his two young sons when all three were shot in cold blood. A wealthy federal judge, there's no short list of people who could have a vendetta against Sand, but the gruesome murders, especially that of his children, turn their St. Paul community on its head. Sand was on the verge of a major donation to a local housing charity, Heart/Twin Cities, and with the money in limbo, eyes suddenly...