Showing results by author "John Sandford" in All Categories

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.

When federal judge Alex Sand and his two young sons are shot in cold blood at their family home, the brutality of the murders leaves their wealthy St. Paul community reeling. There's no shortage of people with a vendetta against the judge, but the collapse of a major charitable donation he had planned complicates things further, leaving the money in limbo and all eyes on his grief-stricken widow. As public pressure mounts and both the local police force and the FBI hit one dead end after another, it isn't long before Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers are called in.

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.

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.

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.

Lucas Davenport had crossed paths with her before. A rich psychopath, Taryn Grant had run successfully for the US Senate, where Lucas had predicted she'd fit right in. He was also convinced that she'd been responsible for three murders, though he'd never been able to prove it. He was right. A federal marshal now, with a very wide scope of investigation, he's heard rumours that Grant has found her seat on the Senate intelligence committee, and the contacts she's made from it, to be very...useful.

A group of vigilantes known only as ‘The Five' are targeting the worst of society – rapists, murderers and thieves – and they use their unlimited resources to offset the damage done by those who they've killed, donating untraceable Bitcoin to charities and victims via the Dark Web. Soon, they are the most popular figures on social media . . . but their motives may not be entirely pure.

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. 

After the events in Gathering Prey, Lucas Davenport finds himself in a very unusual situation: he is no longer employed by the Minnesota BCA. His friend the governor is just cranking up a presidential campaign, though, and he invites Lucas to come along as part of his campaign staff. 'Should be fun!' he says, and it kind of is - until they find they have a shadow: an armed man intent on killing the governor...and anyone who gets in the way.

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.

In Shadow Prey, the crackling sequel to Rules of Prey, Twin Cities sleuth Lucas Davenport teams up with NYPD Lieutenant Lily Rothenberg to track down an elusive killer known only as Shadow Love. Among the victims are a Minneapolis slumlord, a judge from Oklahoma City, and a Manhattan politician. The murder weapon is a Native American ceremonial knife.

At first, Clayton Deese seems like your run-of-the-mill criminal – a gun for hire that keeps the boss from the cops. But after he skips bail following a job gone wrong, the US Marshals see that he could be the key to the whole operation’s undoing. As marshals begin the search of Deese’s place, they find something far darker than they ever expected. There are countless graves lining the back of the house, trophies from a score of killings. Deese may have seemed small-time but the evidence says otherwise - they are dealing with a frenzied and prolific serial killer.

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.

Having spent two years in hiding, a big-time robber is back. It's a couple of weeks before the Republican party convention and thousands are spending cash, which is flowing into a warehouse protected by only a few armed guards. Meanwhile, Lucas Davenport has problems of his own. He's been targeted by a psychopathic pimp, but it's not Davenport he's after; it's his daughter.

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.

Shay Remby arrives in Hollywood with $58 and a handmade knife, searching for her brother, Odin. Odin’s a brilliant hacker but a bit of a loose cannon. He and a group of radical animal-rights activists hit a Singular Corp. research lab in Eugene, Oregon. The raid was a disaster, but Odin escaped with a set of highly encrypted flash drives and a post-surgical dog. When Shay gets a frantic 3 a.m. phone call from Odin - talking about evidence of unspeakable experiments, and a ruthless corporation, and how he must hide - she’s concerned.

Shay Remby and her gang of renegades have struck a blow to the Singular Corporation. When they rescued Shay’s brother, Odin, from a secret Singular lab, they also liberated a girl. Singular has been experimenting on her, trying to implant a US senator’s memories into her brain - with partial success. Fenfang is now a girl who literally knows too much. Can the knowledge brought by ex-captives Odin and Fenfang help Shay and her friends expose the crimes of this corrupt corporation? Singular has already killed one of Shay’s band to protect their secrets.

Anno 2066. Un tirocinante della Caltech Astrofisica nota un'anomalia nei dati forniti da un potente telescopio spaziale: qualcosa si sta approssimando all'orbita di Saturno. La sua velocità è in diminuzione, la traiettoria di avvicinamento sotto controllo... A quanto pare non si tratta di un semplice oggetto orbitante nello spazio. Il governo degli Stati Uniti giunge all'inevitabile conclusione: quell'oggetto è un'astronave aliena, e chiunque l'abbia costruita deve avvalersi di una tecnologia molto avanzata.

Es ist das Signal, auf das die Welt seit Beginn der Weltraumforschung wartet - in der Nähe des Saturns ist ein künstliches, unbekanntes Objekt gesichtet worden. Ein amerikanisches Team bricht sofort zu dem fernen Planeten auf. Doch alles auf der Reise geht schief, und noch bevor sie den Saturn erreichen, erkennen die Astronauten, dass es nahezu unmöglich sein wird, zur Erde zurückzukehren.

In the small Minnesota town of Deephaven, an entire family has been killed. There's something about the scene that pokes at Lucas's cop instincts - it looks a lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution he's seen in drug killings sometimes. But this is an up-market town, and the husband was an executive at a big bank. It just doesn't seem to fit. Until it does. And where it leads Lucas will take him into the darkest nightmare of his life.