"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...

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....

Lucas Davenport has seen many terrible murder scenes. This is one of the worst. In the Minnesota town of Wayzata, an entire family has been killed - husband, wife, kids, dogs. On the wall, in blood: "Were coming." No apostrophe. The scene looks an awful lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution Lucas has seen from Mexican drug gangs. But this is a seriously upscale town, the husband ran a modest software company, the wife dabbled in local politics....

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.