Cork O'Connor has lost both his wife and his job as sheriff and falls into a profound emotional isolation. As a wild blizzard buries his lakeside town, a despised though influential resident is found dead, and a young Ojibwe Indian boy seems to have left home in a hurry. Cork has never taken Indian legends to heart, but when an old sage warns him that a cruel spirit with a heart of ice is near, all that changes.

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...

When the body of a year-missing Ojibwa girl washes up on a Lake Superior island, rekindling Native American superstitions about mythical monsters, Cork O'Connor struggles to obtain information from reluctant witnesses to a brutal sex-trafficking operation. "When the body of a teenage Ojibwe girl washes up on the shore of an island in Lake Superior, the residents of the nearby Bad Bluff reservation whisper that it was the work of a mythical beast,...

Former sheriff Cork O'Connor is hired to find a friend's daughter, a country-western singer missing in the wilds of Minnesota. O'Connor discovers FBI agents and a gangster from a casino are also looking for the woman, but they won't say why.

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, two kids, dogs. On the wall, in blood: "Were coming." No apostrophe. There's something about the scene that tugs at Lucas's cop instincts-it looks an awful lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution he's seen from Mexican drug gangs. But this is a seriously upscale town, the husband...

The sheriff is running for his life from professional hit men who have already put a bullet through his leg. Desperate, he finds sanctuary outside a small town called Bodine on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in an old resort owned by his cousin, Jewell DuBois. Though Jewell, a bitter widow whose husband may have been killed by cops, keeps Cork at arm's length, her fourteen-year-old son, Ren, is looking for a friend. But being a father figure to Ren...

“One of the strongest in Sandford’s Prey series.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Good, dark, perverse, bloody fun.”—The Washington Post Book World
Theories abound when a Russian gets himself killed on the shore of Lake Superior—shot with fifty-year-old bullets. But when it turns out he had very high government connections, state troubleshooter Lucas Davenport gets the call. Well,...

His old boss, Rose Marie Roux, has moved up to the state level and taken Lucas with her, creating a special trouble-shooter job for him for the cases that are too complicated or politically touchy for others to handle. Of course, Lucas is married now, and a new father, all of which is fine with him; he doesn't mind being a family man. But he is a little worried. If there's one thing Lucas Davenport knows, it's that for every bit of peace you get,...

After 17-year-old Charlotte Kane--the beautiful, brilliant, and brooding daughter of a rich widower--disappears on a drunken New Years' Eve snowmobile ride, a raging blizzard soon snuffs out all search efforts. When her body is found during the spring thaw four months later, preliminary evidence implicates her ex-boyfriend--Ojibwe bad-boy, Solemn Winter Moon. But then a second Charlotte Kane turns up dead, and Cork isn't sure of anything any more....

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,...