Showing results by author "John Sandford" in All Categories

An off-duty coast guardsman is fishing with his family when he calls in some suspicious behaviour from a nearby boat. It's a snazzy craft, slick and outfitted with extra horsepower, and is zipping along until it slows to pick up a surfaced diver...a diver who was apparently alone, without his own boat, in the middle of the ocean. None of it makes sense, and his hunch is proved right when all three guardsmen who come out to investigate are shot and killed.

When federal judge Alex Sand and his two young sons are shot in cold blood at their family home, the brutality of the murders leaves their wealthy St. Paul community reeling. There's no shortage of people with a vendetta against the judge, but the collapse of a major charitable donation he had planned complicates things further, leaving the money in limbo and all eyes on his grief-stricken widow. As public pressure mounts and both the local police force and the FBI hit one dead end after another, it isn't long before Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers are called in.

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.

In Southeast Minnesota, a school board meeting is coming to an end. The board chairman announces that the rest of the meeting will be closed due to personnel issues. Issues is correct. The proposal up for a vote is whether to authorise the killing of a local reporter. Meanwhile, Virgil Flowers is helping out a friend by looking into a dognapping when he gets a call from Lucas Davenport. A murdered body has been found, and the victim is a local reporter....

The superstore chain PyeMart has its sights set on a Minnesota river town, but two very angry groups want to stop it. The first bomb goes off on the top floor of PyeMart's headquarters. The second one explodes at the construction site itself. Who's behind the bombs, and how far will they go? It's Virgil Flowers's job to find out... before more people get killed.

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. 

In this incredible follow-up to the New York Times and USA Today best seller FaceOff, 22 of the world's most popular thriller writers come together for an unforgettable anthology. MatchUp takes the never-before-seen best seller pairings of FaceOff and adds a delicious new twist: gender. Eleven of the world's best female thriller writers, from Diana Gabaldon to Charlaine Harris, are paired with 11 of the world's best male thriller writers.

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.

On a late autumn Sunday in Southern Minnesota, a farmer is bludgeoned around the head by a teenager wielding a bat. Following the teenager’s apparent suicide, Sheriff Lee Coakley is worried that she is up against a far more complicated case than she first thought, and calls in investigator Virgil Flowers. It doesn't take long for Flowers to uncover a series of crimes so monstrous that the small town can never be the same again.

In Eyes of Prey, a depressed and unfocused Davenport takes on a macabre case, tracking down a serial killer whose attacks are focused on the eyes of his victims. With all of his current inner turmoil, Davenport isn't sure that he should accept the case when he hears about the murder of Stephanie Bekker, the wife of a prominent physician. But when a second woman dies, her face cruelly maimed like the first, he feels that clutching intensity of interest that means he is involved whether he wants to be or not.

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.

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 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 a great deal more extreme than others - as Virgil is about to find out. Forget a storm...this one’s a tornado.

A few years back, Virgil investigated the corrupt - and, as it turned out, homicidal - local school board in Trippton, Minnesota. Now the town's back in view with more alarming news: a woman's been found frozen in ice. There's a possibility that it might be connected to a high school class of 20 years ago, and so Virgil begins to dig into 20 years' worth of bad blood.

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. 

Doris Grandfelt, an employee at an accounting firm, was brutally stabbed to death . . . but nobody knew exactly where the crime took place. Her body was found the next night, dumped among a dense thicket of trees along the edge of an urban park, eight miles east of St. Paul, Minnesota. Despite her twin sister Lara Grandfelt’s persistent calls to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the killer was never found.

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.

"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.

A house demolition provides an unpleasant surprise for the Minneapolis Police - the bodies of two girls, wrapped in plastic. It looks like they've been there a long time, and Lucas Davenport knows exactly how long. With the bodies discovered, an old case is resurrected - but there's something wrong with the evidence. As Davenport investigates, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: It wasn't just the bodies that were buried. It was the truth.

When Scott then disappears without a trace, Letty Davenport is tasked with tracking down any and all leads. Scott's connections to sensitive research into virus and pathogen spread has multiple national and international organizations on high alert, and his shockingly high clearance levels at various institutions, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, make him the last person they'd like to go missing.

Bonnie and Clyde, they thought. And what's-his-name, the sidekick. Three teenagers with dead-end lives, and chips on their shoulders, and guns. As their crime spree cuts a swathe through Minnesota, captured on the killers' cell phones, and sent to a local television station, Investigator Virgil Flowers joins the growing army of cops trying to catch them. But even he doesn't realise what's about to happen next.