Showing results by author "John Sandford" in All Categories

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.

An orchestrated series of ritual killings has shocked the nation. Partnered by New York police officer Lily Rothenburg, Detective Lucas Davenport will need all the tricks he has learnt on the streets of Minneapolis as he searches through the shadows and mysteries of the American Indian community, trying to track down the obsessed minds behind the bloody vengeance killings - before the team of killers finally goes out of control.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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. 

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.

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....

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....

Shay Remby and her band of renegade activists have got the corrupt Singular Corporation on the run. Their exposé is finally working. Or is it? Even as revelations about the human experimental subjects break in the news, Singular's employees are slithering out of sight. And then their CEO is killed in a plane crash.... Was it a freak accident? Or a cover-up?

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.

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.

In Shadow Prey, the crackling sequel to Rules of Prey, Twin Cities sleuth Lucas Davenport teams up with NYPD Lieutenant Lily Rothenberg to track down an elusive killer known only as Shadow Love. Among the victims are a Minneapolis slumlord, a judge from Oklahoma City, and a Manhattan politician. The murder weapon is a Native American ceremonial knife.

Lucas Davenport had crossed paths with her before. A rich psychopath, Taryn Grant had run successfully for the US Senate, where Lucas had predicted she'd fit right in. He was also convinced that she'd been responsible for three murders, though he'd never been able to prove it. He was right. A federal marshal now, with a very wide scope of investigation, he's heard rumours that Grant has found her seat on the Senate intelligence committee, and the contacts she's made from it, to be very...useful.