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.

When protests about a superstore chain's plans to build a location in a Minnesota river town escalate into bombing attacks at the construction site and the company's headquarters, Virgil Flowers races against time to find and stop the bomber.

"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...

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,...

Called in to assist the sheriff from a remote, rural area of Wisconsin in his investigation into a brutal triple homicide, Lucas Davenport begins to uncover a shocking series of vicious crimes that stun even Davenport with their evil intent.

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...