In the aftermath of a school board's secret decision to have a local reporter murdered, Virgil Flowers' investigation of a sinister dognapping is interrupted by a suspicious death.

When the mayor of Pinion, Minnesota tries to turn his small town into a religious shrine, his plan is interrupted by the discovery of a dead body.

Hannah Swensen thinks she killed a former high school football hero with her car, until an autopsy reveals the victim was dead before Hannah even hit him, his shirt covered in stains from a blackberry pie.

New York Times Bestseller
USA Today Bestseller
Publishers Weekly Bestseller
Bakery owner Hannah Swensen is leaving Lake Eden to help a friend in sunny California. But an unexpected phone call swiftly brings her back to a cold Minnesota winter . . . and murder . . .

When Hannah learns that her sister Michelle's boyfriend, Detective...

"When two young women leave their college campus in the dead of winter for a 700-mile drive north to Minnesota, they suddenly find themselves fighting for their lives in the icy waters of the Black Root River, just miles from home. One girl's survival, and the other's death--murder, actually--stun the citizens of a small Minnesota town, thawing memories of another young woman who lost her life in the same river ten years earlier, and whose killer...

The first Virgil Flowers novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford.
“Virgil Flowers, introduced in bestseller Sandford’s Prey series, gets a chance to shine...The thrice-divorced, affable member of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), who reports to Prey series hero Lucas Davenport, operates pretty much on his own..”*
He’s been doing the hard stuff for three years, but...

When he finds the daughter of a woman he failed to protect from a violent husband years ago hiding out in his lakeside cottage, Duluth PD Lieutenant Jonathan Stride is driven by guilt and duty to help her.

Their family farms devastated by a Minnesota drought in 1987, a father searches for answers after his son commits a heinous murder, while a pastor's wife returns to the town for mysterious reasons of her own.

When an accident kills a driver on the roads outside Duluth, Jonathan Stride investigates the victim's false identity and possession of a recently fired gun, a situation that may be tied to the disappearance of a college student.