"In southeast Minnesota, down on the Mississippi, a school board meeting is coming to a close. The board chairman announces that the rest of the meeting will be closed, due to personnel issues. "Issues" is correct. The proposal up for a vote before them is whether a local reporter should die. And the vote is four to one in favor. Meanwhile, not far away, Virgil Flowers is doing a favor for a friend by looking into a dognapping, which seems to be turning...

Pinion, 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....

"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 sick 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. Then there's the homefront....

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.

Virgil Flowers, 30, a cop with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, had come to Bluestem in search of a killer. There hadn't been a murder in Bluestem in years, but now suddenly there had been three. He thought some of his previous cases had been hard, but they were nothing compared to this one. All he knew for sure was that the three murders were somehow connected and he was determined to discover how, hopefully before he became the next...

Approached by an Israeli police officer who is tailing a man in possession of a stolen religious relic, Virgil Flowers learns that the artifact reveals startling details about the biblical King Solomon and that dangerous rivals are killing everyone who would protect it.

Virgil Flowers joins the growing army of cops trying to run down three teenagers with dead-end lives who are on a crime spree in Minnesota and who think they are just like Bonnie and Clyde, and their sidekick.