"In southeast Minnesota, down on the Mississippi, a school board meeting is coming to a close. 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 before them is whether a local reporter should die. And the vote is four to one in favor. Meanwhile, not far away, Virgil Flowers is doing a favor for a friend by looking into a dognapping, which seems to be turning...

"An off-duty Coast Guardsman is fishing with his family when he calls in some suspicious behavior 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 unless there's something hinky going on, and his hunch is proved right when all three Guardsmen...

Virgil Flowers is only in his late 30s, but he's been around the block a few times, and he doesn't think much can surprise him. He's about to be proved wrong. On a hot, humid summer night in Minnesota, Flowers is in bed with one of his ex-wives when the phone rings. It's Lucas Davenport. There's a body near a veteran's memorial in Stillwater with two shots to the head. The victim has a lemon in his mouth, exactly like the body they found a week ago....

Very early, 4:45, on a bitterly cold Minnesota morning, three men burst through the door of a hospital pharmacy, duct-tape the hands, feet, mouth, and eyes of two pharmacy workers, and clean the place out. But then things go bad. One of the workers dies, and the robbers hustle out to their truck and find themselves for just one second face-to-face with a blond woman in the garage: Weather Karkinnen, surgeon, wife of an investigator named Lucas Davenport....

Back in 1985, two girls disappeared, and fledgling cop Lucas Davenport couldn't get over it, even when his boss declared the case closed. Now a house has been torn down, the bodies of two girls wrapped in plastic have been found, and Davenport is back on the case.

Lucas Davenport's old boss, Rose Marie Roux, has moved up and taken Lucas with her, creating for him a special troubleshooting job for the cases that are to complicated for others to handle. In addition, Lucas is married now, and a new father. But he's a little worried. For every bit of peace you get, you have to pay-- and he's waiting for the bill. It comes in the form of two naked people, a white woman and a black man, found hanging from a tree...

"Late afternoon, Virginia, and a woman is on the run. Her husband, a former U.S. senator named Lincoln Bowe, has been missing for days. Kidnapped? Murdered? She doesn't know, but she thinks she knows who's involved, and why. And that she may be next." "Hours later, a phone rings in the pocket of Jacob Winter. An Army Intelligence veteran, Winter specializes in what he thinks of as forensic bureaucracy. Congress, the Pentagon, the FBI, CIA, Homeland...

"When an animal rights action at a research lab goes wrong, a terrible secret is exposed, and Shay must find her brother Odin before the researchers at Singular Corp can silence both of them" --

Kidd's friend, Bobby the superhacker, has been murdered. When Kidd goes to Bobby's house to investigate, he finds his battered body, but not his jazzed-up laptop. Now Kidd is doubly disturbed. The murderer is still at large and now has enough secret information to hang a whole lot of people, including Kidd himself. Dodging both the law and other computerheads who want Bobby's information, kidd has to move fast if he is going to survive.

Approached by an Israeli police officer who is tailing a man in possession of a stolen religious relic, Virgil Flowers learns that the artifact reveals startling details about the biblical King Solomon and that dangerous rivals are killing everyone who would protect it.