Monkeewrench Mysteries

People are dying for the new computer game by the software company Monkeewrench. Literally. With Serial Killer Detective out in limited release, the real-life murders of a jogger and a young woman have already mimicked the first two scenarios in the game. But Grace McBride and her eccentric Monkeewrench partners are caught in a vise. If they tell the Minneapolis police of the link between their game and the murders, they'll shine a spotlight on the past they thought they had erased-and the horror they thought they'd left behind.

Minneapolis detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth are bored—ever since they solved the Monkeewrench case, the Twin Cities have been in a murder-free dry spell, as people no longer seem interested in killing one another. But with two brutal homicides taking place in one awful night, the crime drought ends—not with a trickle, but with an eventual torrent. Who would kill Morey Gilbert, a man without an enemy, a man who might as well have been a saint?

Computer game company founders Grace MacBride and Annie Belinsky—along with Wisconsin deputy Sharon Mueller—are en route to Green Bay, following reports of a serial killer, when their car breaks down deep in the northern woods. A short walk through the forest leads them to the eerily quiet town of Four Corners, where they find severed phone lines and a complete absence of any life. But the quiet is deceptive. Before they know it, they witness a horrifying double murder—and discover that this is only the beginning of a race to save their own lives… and countless others.

With the holiday's over and the long cold winter looming, January can be a bleak month in Minneapolis. So what better way to bring a little cheer to the good people of the city than sponsoring an old-fashioned snowman-building contest? In a matter of hours, a local park is filled with the innocent laughter of children and their frosty creations. But things take an awful turn when the dead bodies of police officers are discovered inside two of the snowmen—sending the entire department and Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth on high alert.

It's eighty-five degrees in the shade when Minneapolis detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth pull into the MPD parking garage. They're driving a tricked-out Caddy, repossessed from a low-level drug dealer. It's not a Beemer or a Mercedes, but it's got GPS, air-conditioning, and power seats with more positions than the Kama Sutra. Things are heating up inside the station-house, too. The bomb squad's off to investigate another suspicious package at the mall, and kids are beating the crap out of one another and posting it on YouTube.

Off the Florida coast, Grace MacBride, partner in software company Monkeewrench, thwarts an assassination attempt on a retired FBI agent. A few hours afterward in Minneapolis, a young girl’s throat is slashed. Later that day, two men are killed execution style. Minneapolis Homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth struggle to link the three crimes, but the wave of murders across the country has only just begun. Piece by piece, evidence accumulates, pointing to a suspect—and a motive—that shocks them to the core. It puts the entire Midwest on high alert ...

The peaceful Christmas season in Minneapolis is shattered when two friends, Chuck Spencer and Wally Luntz, scheduled to meet in person for the first time, are murdered on the same night, two hours and several miles apart, dramatically concluding winter vacation for homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth. An hour north of Minneapolis, Lydia Ascher comes home to find two dead men in her basement. When Leo and Gino discover her connection to their current cases, they suspect that she is a target, too.

When homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth are called to a crime scene in a heavily-wooded city park, the setting is all too familiar. And when they discover a playing card on the victim's body, their worst fears are confirmed: There's a serial killer operating in the city for the first time in years. As the violence accelerates in Minneapolis, Magozzi and Rolseth soon realize their killer is planning to complete the deck, and they enlist Grace MacBride and her unconventional partners at Monkeewrench Software to help stop the rampage.

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.

Minneapolis homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth arrest a sadistic pair of killers for the murder of several women with the help of Monkeewrench, their eccentric, cyber-sleuth friends and partners. One of the killers dies in custody and the other, Wolfgang Mauer, is sent to a maximum security mental hospital in a rural corner of Minnesota.