At 1:15 a.m, a Minnesota political fixer answers his doorbell. The next thing he knows, he's waking up on the floor of a moving car, lying on a plastic sheet, his body wet with blood. When the car stops, a voice says, "Hey, I think he's breathing," and another voice says, "Yeah? Give me the bat." And that's the last thing he ever knows. Lucas Davenport is investigating another case when the trail leads to the man's disappearance, then--very troublingly--to...

The night after the fourth of July, Layton Carlson Jr., of Red Wing, Minnesota, finally got lucky. And unlucky. He' picked the perfect spot to lose his virginity to his girlfriend, an abandoned farmyard in the middle of cornfields: nice, private, and quiet. The only problem was something smelled bad -- like, really bad. He mentioned it to a county deputy he knew, and when the cop took a look, he found a body stuffed down a cistern. And then another,...

Spring has come to Minneapolis, bringing with it an unseasonable heat wave...and a chilling end to the longest murder-free stretch the local homicide detectives have seen in years. Two old men died the same night. One was tied to train tracks and left to die. The other was shot in the head beside a greenhouse at the nursery he owned, his body left out in rain that washed the crime scene clean. Other than the fact that they lived in the same neighborhood,...

It's a bitter winter in Minnesota--too cold to kill. There hasn't been a murder for a month, but the lull quickly comes to an end for Detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth, when they're called to the gruesome homicide of Kelly Ramage. Found in a friend's vacant house, this was no random attack, and clues reveal that she was living a very dangerous secret life. Magozzi and Gino trace her steps back to an art gallery where she was last seen alive....