Showing results by author "John Sandford" in All Categories

“Fans of Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers will eat this up.” --Stephen King For fans of THE MARTIAN, an extraordinary new thriller of the future from #1 New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Sandford and internationally known photo-artist and science fiction...

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.

A few years back, Virgil investigated the corrupt - and, as it turned out, homicidal - local school board in Trippton, Minnesota. Now the town's back in view with more alarming news: a woman's been found frozen in ice. There's a possibility that it might be connected to a high school class of 20 years ago, and so Virgil begins to dig into 20 years' worth of bad blood.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

From the author of the #1 bestselling Prey novels comes an extraordinary story of murder, passion, and deadly ambition.

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.

Now a statewide troubleshooter, Detective Lucas Davenport is plunged into a murder investigation that involves a Russian corpse, 50-year-old bullets, and some high-level government connections. Haunting and suspenseful, each addition to John Sandford's Prey series shoots to the top of national best-seller lists.

The first body is of a young woman, found on a Minneapolis riverbank, her throat cut, her body scourged and put on display. Whoever did this, Lucas Davenport knows, is pushed by brain chemistry. There is something wrong with him. This isn’t a bad love affair. The second body is found three weeks later, in a farmhouse six miles south. Same condition, same display—except this time it is a man. Nothing to link the two victims, nothing to indicate that the killings end here.

Clara Rinker is the best hitwoman in the business. An attractive, well-spoken southern woman, she does her job, collects her money, and disappears. But when a prominent defense attorney hires her for a hit in Minnesota, her life gets complicated. A witness survives, and she's on Lucas Davenport's turf.

Doris Grandfelt, an employee at an accounting firm, was brutally stabbed to death . . . but nobody knew exactly where the crime took place. Her body was found the next night, dumped among a dense thicket of trees along the edge of an urban park, eight miles east of St. Paul, Minnesota. Despite her twin sister Lara Grandfelt’s persistent calls to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the killer was never found.

A daring drugs raid on a Minneapolis hospital, during which a medical orderly is murdered, takes place on the same day that Lucas Davenport's surgeon wife, Weather, is due to perform a high-profile operation to separate conjoined twin girls. Investigating the raid, Davenport concludes that it must have been an inside job and - as a witness to the criminals' desperate getaway - Weather is now in grave danger.

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.

The first storm comes from, of all places, the Minnesota zoo. Two large and very rare Amur tigers have vanished from their cage, and authorities are worried that they’ve been stolen for their body parts. Traditional Chinese medicine prizes those parts for home remedies, and people will do extreme things to get what they need. Some of them are a great deal more extreme than others - as Virgil is about to find out. Forget a storm...this one’s a tornado.

"You should have killed me," were Bekker’s parting words - perhaps he was right. All through the humiliations of the trial, the horrors of imprisonment, the daily agonies of not having the drugs that kept him humming, Bekker takes solace in the thought that one day he will make Lucas Davenport pay. Minutes before the jury’s verdict, Bekker slays his prison guard and escapes into New York City. Hiding himself in an elderly woman’s home, he continues to conduct his gruesome experiments, searching the eyes of his victims for the meaning of death.