While competing in a fishing tournament in a remote area of Northern Minnesota, Virgil Flowers receives a call from Lucas Davenport to investigate a brutal murder at a nearby resort for women only. As Virgil begins investigating, he finds a web of connections between the people at the resort, the victim, and some local women, notably a talented and popular country singer. The more Virgil digs, the more he discovers the arrows of suspicion point in many directions, encompassing a multitude of motivations: jealousy, blackmail, greed, anger, and fear. 

Clayton Deese looks like a small-time criminal, muscle for hire when his loan shark boss needs to teach someone a lesson. Now, seven months after a job that went south and landed him in jail, Deese has skipped out on bail, and the US Marshals come looking for him. They don't much care about a low-level guy - it's his boss they want - but Deese might be their best chance to bring down the whole operation. Then, they step onto a dirt trail behind Deese's rural Louisiana cabin and find a jungle full of graves.

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 radical groups. It's obviously alarming - is there an unstable extremist tracking the loved ones of powerful politicians with deadly intent? But when the FBI is called in, there isn't much the feds can do.

Layton had picked the perfect spot to lose his virginity to his girlfriend - an abandoned farmyard in the middle of cornfields. The only problem was something smelled bad... He mentioned it to a county deputy he knew, and when they looked, they found a body stuffed down a cistern. By the time Lucas Davenport was called in, the police were up to fifteen bodies and counting. The victims had been killed over many years, one every summer. How could this have happened without anybody noticing?

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.

Her name is Clara Rinker, a southern woman, trim, pleasant, attractive, and the best hit woman in the business. She isn't showy; she just goes quietly about her business, collects her money, and goes home.

Very early one morning, 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 knows. Davenport is investigating another case when the trail leads to the man’s disappearance, then - very troublingly - to the Minneapolis police department, then - most troublingly of all - to a woman who could give Machiavelli lessons.

.Lucas Davenport has seen many terrible murder scenes. This is one of the worst. In the small Minnesota town of Deephaven, an entire family has been killed - husband, wife, two daughters, dogs. There’s something about the scene that pokes at Lucas’s cop instincts - it looks an awful lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution he’s seen in drug killings sometimes. But this is a seriously upscale town, and the husband was an executive vice president at a big bank. It just doesn’t seem to fit.

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. Once a psychopath had gotten that kind of rush, though, he or she often needed another fix, so he figured he might be seeing her again. He was right.

A house demolition provides an unpleasant surprise for Minneapolis - the bodies of two girls, wrapped in plastic. It looks like they've been there a long time. Lucas Davenport knows exactly how long.In 1985, Davenport was a young cop with a reputation for recklessness, and the girls' disappearance was a big deal. His bosses ultimately declared the case closed, but he never agreed with that. Now that he has a chance to investigate it all over again, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: It wasn't just the bodies that were buried. It was the truth.

The company chairman lay on the cold ground of the woods, his eyes unseeing, his orange hunting jacket punctured by a rifle bullet at close range. Around him stood the four executives with whom he had been hunting, each with his or her own complicated agenda, each with a reason not to be sorrowful about the man's death. If he read it in a book, Lucas Davenport thought, it would seem like one of those classic murder mysteries, the kind where the detective gathers everyone together at the end and solves the case with a little speech.

The "Big Three" are a trio of inmates locked up in the Minnesota Security Hospital over the years, each a particularly vicious serial killer, each with his own distinct style and propensities. Everybody feels much safer knowing that they're behind bars. Except...there's a new killer on the loose. And his handiwork bears a disturbing resemblance to some of the finer points practiced by the Big Three, details that never even made the papers.

They call them Travelers. They move from city to city, panhandling, committing no crimes - they just like to stay on the move. And now somebody is killing them. Lucas Davenport's adopted daughter, Letty, is home from college when she gets a phone call from a woman Traveler she'd befriended in San Francisco. The woman thinks somebody's killing her friends, she's afraid she knows who it is, and now her male companion has gone missing.

The Republicans are coming to St. Paul for their convention. Throwing a big party is supposed to be fun, but crashing the party are a few hard cases the police would rather have stayed away. Chief among them is a crew of professional stick-up men who've spotted several lucrative opportunities, ranging from political moneymen with briefcases full of cash to that armored-car warehouse with the weakness in its security system.

In a wealthy Minneapolis neighborhood, two elderly women are bludgeoned to death. They are apparent victims of a random robbery, though nothing of value appears to have been stolen. But when Lucas Davenport looks deeper, he fears that the victims weren’t so random, and the items stolen were far from invaluable. As a pattern emerges it leads Lucas to...certainly not where he expected. Which is too bad, because the killers are expecting him. And that’s only the first surprise.