Showing results by author "John Sandford" in All Categories

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A group of vigilantes known only as ‘The Five' are targeting the worst of society – rapists, murderers and thieves – and they use their unlimited resources to offset the damage done by those who they've killed, donating untraceable Bitcoin to charities and victims via the Dark Web. Soon, they are the most popular figures on social media . . . but their motives may not be entirely pure.

At first, Clayton Deese seems like your run-of-the-mill criminal – a gun for hire that keeps the boss from the cops. But after he skips bail following a job gone wrong, the US Marshals see that he could be the key to the whole operation’s undoing. As marshals begin the search of Deese’s place, they find something far darker than they ever expected. There are countless graves lining the back of the house, trophies from a score of killings. Deese may have seemed small-time but the evidence says otherwise - they are dealing with a frenzied and prolific serial killer.

In the small Minnesota town of Deephaven, an entire family has been killed. There's something about the scene that pokes at Lucas's cop instincts - it looks a lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution he's seen in drug killings sometimes. But this is an up-market town, and the husband was an executive at a big bank. It just doesn't seem to fit. Until it does. And where it leads Lucas will take him into the darkest nightmare of his life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.