From the Publisher: Three murders in just as many weeks in the quiet rural town of Bluestem is unheard of. It's also no coincidence. And it's not over: Detective Virgil Flowers is about to be pulled into the middle of a killer's violent personal vendetta.

The superstore chain PyeMart has its sights set on a Minnesota river town, but two very angry groups want to stop it: local merchants, fearing for their businesses, and environmentalists, predicting ecological disaster. The protests don't seem to be slowing the project, though, until someone decides to take matters into his own hands. The first bomb goes off on the top floor of PyeMart's headquarters. The second one explodes at the construction...

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...

While competing in a fishing tournament in a remote area of northern Minnesota, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers gets a call from Lucas Davenport to investigate a murder at a nearby resort, where a woman has been shot while kayaking. The more he digs, the more he discovers the arrows of suspicion that point in many directions--then he finds that this is not the first murder, that there was a second, seemingly unrelated...

When a murder suspect commits suicide after his arrest for killing a soybean farmer, Virgil Flowers uncovers a multi-generation, multi-family conspiracy involving a series of monstrous crimes.