A drug-cartel counting house gets robbed in Biloxi, Mississippi, and suitcases full of cash disappear, leaving behind five bodies, including that of a six-year-old girl. Davenport takes the case, which quickly spirals out of control, as cartel assassins compete with Davenport to find the Dixie Hicks shooters who knocked over the counting house. Things get ugly real fast, and neither the cartel killers nor the holdup men give a damn about whose lives Davenport might have saved; to them, he's just another large target.

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 realise he's dealing with people who, on this one particular issue, are functionally crazy. 

Pinion, Minnesota: a huge city of all of 700 folks who define the phrase ‘small town’. Nothing has ever happened in Pinion, and nothing ever will...until the mayor of sorts comes up with a scheme to put Pinion on the map. He’s heard of a place where a floating image of the Virgin Mary turned the whole town into a shrine, attracting thousands of curious people and making the townsfolk rich overnight. Why not stage a prank in Pinion and do the same? What could go wrong? And then a dead body shows up. 

After the events in Gathering Prey, Lucas Davenport finds himself in a very unusual situation: he is no longer employed by the Minnesota BCA. His friend the governor is just cranking up a presidential campaign, though, and he invites Lucas to come along as part of his campaign staff. 'Should be fun!' he says, and it kind of is - until they find they have a shadow: an armed man intent on killing the governor...and anyone who gets in the way.

Layton had picked the perfect spot to lose his virginity to his girlfriend - an abandoned farmyard in the middle of cornfields. The only problem was something smelled bad... He mentioned it to a county deputy he knew, and when they looked, they found a body stuffed down a cistern. By the time Lucas Davenport was called in, the police were up to fifteen bodies and counting. The victims had been killed over many years, one every summer. How could this have happened without anybody noticing?

A daring drugs raid on a Minneapolis hospital, during which a medical orderly is murdered, takes place on the same day that Lucas Davenport's surgeon wife, Weather, is due to perform a high-profile operation to separate conjoined twin girls. Investigating the raid, Davenport concludes that it must have been an inside job and - as a witness to the criminals' desperate getaway - Weather is now in grave danger.

"You should have killed me," were Bekker’s parting words - perhaps he was right. All through the humiliations of the trial, the horrors of imprisonment, the daily agonies of not having the drugs that kept him humming, Bekker takes solace in the thought that one day he will make Lucas Davenport pay. Minutes before the jury’s verdict, Bekker slays his prison guard and escapes into New York City. Hiding himself in an elderly woman’s home, he continues to conduct his gruesome experiments, searching the eyes of his victims for the meaning of death.

For Maddog, the killer who had Minneapolis in a grip of chilled terror, satisfaction came from the thrill of the contest. After each grisly murder he would leave behind one of the rules he had devised: Never kill anyone you know. Never have a motive. Never follow a discernible pattern. He was no textbook psychopath. But Lieutenant Lucas Davenport was no ordinary detective. To bring an end to Maddog's trail of death, he would have to play by his own rules.

Lucas Davenport's adopted daughter, Letty, is home from college when she gets a phone call from a woman Traveler she'd befriended in San Francisco. The woman thinks somebody's killing her friends, she's afraid she knows who it is, and now her male companion has gone missing. Letty tells Lucas she's going to get her, and, though he suspects Letty's getting played, he volunteers to go with her....

The daughter of a US senator is monitoring her social media presence when she finds a picture of herself on a strange blog. And there are other pictures...of the children of other influential Washington politicians, walking or standing outside their schools, each identified by name. Surrounding the photos are texts of vicious political rants from a motley variety of extremist groups. It's obviously alarming - there's an unstated but deadly threat here - but when the FBI is called in, there isn't much the feds can do. 

The Iceman crept into the house on the edge of the lake. He killed the father first. Then the mother and child. And when his work was done, he set the house on fire…. Lucas Davenport has tracked killers in cities across America. But the woods of rural Wisconsin are as dark and primal as evil itself. The winters are harsher and colder. And in the heart of every mother and father, there is fear... Because tonight, the Iceman cometh.

Virgil Flowers heads north to solve a puzzling murder - and finds that the country is very rough indeed. While competing in a fishing tournament in a remote area of northern Minnesota, Flowers gets a call from Lucas Davenport asking him to investigate a murder at a nearby resort, where a woman has been shot while kayaking. The resort is for women only: a place to relax, get fit, recover from plastic surgery and commune with nature. It's also hotbed of jealousy, blackmail, greed, anger, and fear.

Murder, scandal, political espionage and an extremely dangerous woman. Lucas Davenport's going to be lucky to get out of this one alive… Lucas Davenport is investigating a vicious smear on a US senator when the trail leads to a political fixer’s disappearance. Then, very troublingly, it leads to the Minneapolis police department, then, most troublingly of all, to a woman who could give Machiavelli lessons.

Back when Harry Bosch was just a rookie homicide detective, he had an inspiring mentor who taught him to take the work personally and light the fire of relentlessness for every case. Now that mentor, J.J. Thompson, is dead, but after his funeral his widow hands Bosch a murder book that Thompson took with him when he left the LAPD 20 years before - the unsolved killing of a troubled young man in an alley used for drug deals. 

Having spent two years in hiding, a big-time robber is back. It's a couple of weeks before the Republican party convention and thousands are spending cash, which is flowing into a warehouse protected by only a few armed guards. Meanwhile, Lucas Davenport has problems of his own. He's been targeted by a psychopathic pimp, but it's not Davenport he's after; it's his daughter.