We re going to murder people who need to be murdered. So begins a press release from a mysterious group known only as The Five, shortly after a vicious predator is murdered in San Francisco. The Five is believed to be made up of vigilante killers who are very bored and very rich. They target the worst of society rapists, murderers, and thieves and then use their unlimited resources to offset the damage done by those who they ve killed, donating untraceable...

Wheatfield, Minnesota: a huge city of all of seven hundred folks who define the phrase 'small town'. Nothing has ever happened in Pinion and nothing ever will ... until the mayor of sorts (campaign promise: `I'll Do What I Can') comes up with a scheme to put Pinion on the map. He's heard of a place where a floating image of the Virgin Mary turned the whole town into a shrine, attracting thousands of curious people and making the townsfolk rich overnight....

Minnesota cop Virgil Flowers teams up with an Israeli cop who is tailing a man who's smuggled out an extraordinary relic -- a copper scroll revealing startling details about the man known as King Solomon. Problems mount when teams of murderous bad guys believe Virgil and the woman cop are getting in their way of claiming the relic for themselves.

Superstore chain PyeMart has its sights set on a Minnesota river town, but two groups want to stop it: local merchants and environmentalists. 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 explodes at the construction site itself. Who's behind the bombs, and how far will they go? It's Virgil Flowers's...

"An off-duty Coast Guardsman is fishing with his family when he calls in some suspicious behavior 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 unless there's something hinky going on, and his hunch is proved right when all three Guardsmen...

Jimmy Sharp, Becky Welsh, Tom McCall. They were 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. The first person they killed was a highway patrolman. The second was a woman during a robbery. Then, hell, why not keep on going? As their crime spree cuts a swath through rural Minnesota, some of it is captured on the killers' cell phones and sent to a local...

Alex Sand was spending the evening at home playing basketball with his two young sons when all three were shot in cold blood. A wealthy federal judge, there's no short list of people who could have a vendetta against Sands, but the gruesome murders, especially that of his children, turn their St. Paul community on its head. Sand was on the verge of a major donation to a local housing charity, Heart/Twin Cities, and with the money in limbo, eyes suddenly...

It is a humid summer night in Minnesota, when Virgil Flowers gets a phone call from Lucas Davenport. A body has been found in Stillwater with two shots to the head. The victim has a lemon in its mouth-- exactly like the body they found last week. The more Flowers works the case, the more convinced he becomes that a list is being kept--one that could have a lot of names on it.