John Sandford

Pinion, Minnesota: a metropolis of all of seven hundred souls 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 a buddy come up with a scheme to put Pinion on the map. They'd heard of a place where a floating image of the Virgin Mary had turned the whole town into a shrine, attracting thousands of pilgrims. And all those...

The "maddog" murderer who is terrorizing the Twin Cities is two things: insane and extremely intelligent. He kills for the pleasure of it and thoroughly enjoys placing elaborate obstacles to keep police befuddled. Each clever move he makes is another point of pride. But when the brilliant Lieutenant Lucas Davenport -- a dedicated cop and a serial killer's worst nightmare -- is brought in to take up the investigation, the maddog suddenly has an adversary...

"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,...

At 1:15 a.m, a Minnesota political fixer answers his doorbell. The next thing he knows, he's waking up on the floor of a moving car, lying on a plastic sheet, his body wet with blood. When the car stops, a voice says, "Hey, I think he's breathing," and another voice says, "Yeah? Give me the bat." And that's the last thing he ever knows. Lucas Davenport is investigating another case when the trail leads to the man's disappearance, then--very troublingly--to...

Upon the discovery of the second body, shot and left near a veterans' memorial with a lemon stuck in it's mouth, Virgil Flowers works to uncover who he believes to be a serial killer, while also trying to detect any possible link to the bodies.

"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 Sands, 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...

Early one Minnesota morning, three men burst into a hospital pharmacy, duct-tape the hands, feet, mouth, and eyes of two pharmacy workers, and clean the place out. But then things swiftly go bad, one of the workers dies, and the robbers hustle out to their truck and find themselves momentarily face-to-face with a blond woman in the garage: the wife of an investigator named Lucas Davenport. Unsure whether or not the woman could later identify them,...

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...

"Lucas Davenport has seen many terrible murder scenes. This is one of the worst. In the small Minnesota town of Deephaven, an entire family has been killed--husband, wife, two daughters, dogs. There's something about the scene that pokes at Lucas's cop instincts--it looks an awful lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution he's seen in drug killings sometimes. But this is a seriously upscale town, and the husband was an executive vice president...

When a murder suspect commits suicide after his arrest for killing a soybean farmer, Virgil Flowers uncovers a multi-generation, multi-family conspiracy involving a series of monstrous crimes.