The Iceman crept into the house on the edge of the lake. He killed the father first. Then the mother and child. And when his work was done, he set the house on fire....
Lucas Davenport has tracked killers in cities across America. But the woods of rural Wisconsin are as dark and primal as evil itself. The winters are harsher and colder. And in the heart of every mother and father, there is fear ...Because tonight, the Iceman cometh.
In southeast Minnesota, a school board meeting is coming to an end. 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 is whether to authorise the killing of a local reporter. Meanwhile, Virgil Flowers is helping out a friend by looking into a dognapping, when he gets a call from Lucas Davenport. A murdered body has been found, and the victim is a local reporter...
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.
A Biloxi, Mississippi, drug-cartel counting house gets robbed, 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.
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.
As their crime spree cuts a swathe through Minnesota, captured on the killers' cell phones and sent to a local television station, Investigator Virgil Flowers joins the growing army of cops trying to catch them. But even he doesn't realise what's about to happen next.
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.
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. Among this group of wildly impassioned, diametrically opposed zealots lurks a killer, and it will be up to Virgil to sort the murderer from the mere maniacs.
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 U.S. 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.
Now Lucas Davenport must find him - after all, that's what he does best. But Deese is ruthless, has an endless network of allies and - as Davenport will come to find - he is also full of surprises
Lucas Davenport investigates a vitriolic blog that seems to be targeting the children of U.S. politicians in the latest thriller by #1 New York Times-bestselling author John Sandford.
The daughter of a U.S. 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. The anonymous photographer can't be pinned down to one location or IP address, and more importantly, at least to the paper-processing bureaucrats, no crime has actually been committed. With nowhere else to turn, influential Senators decide to call in someone who can operate outside the FBI's constraints: Lucas Davenport.
Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers join forces on a deadly maritime case in the remarkable new novel from internationally bestselling author John Sandford.
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.
They're federal officers killed on the job, which means the case is the FBI's turf. When the FBI's investigation stalls out, they call in Lucas Davenport.
And when his case turns lethal, Davenport will need to bring in every asset he can claim, including a detective with a fundamentally criminal mind: Virgil Flowers.
'One of the great novelists of all time' Stephen King
'A series writer who reads like a breath of fresh air' Daily Mirror
'John Sandford knows all there is to know about detonating the gut-level shocks of a good thriller' New York Times Book Review
'John Sandford has the Midas touch' Huffington Post
'Delivers twists to the very last sentence' Daily Mail
'Crime writer John Sandford is one of the best around' Sun
The "Prey" novels by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist John Sandford consistently make the best-seller lists, but they are not for the faint of heart. Featuring Minneapolis Lieutenant Lucas Davenport, these thrillers are raw, graphic, and impossible to put down. In Eyes of Prey, a depressed and unfocused Davenport takes on a macabre case, tracking down a serial killer who maims the eyes of his victims after he has murdered them.
Few writers have explored the human dark side with as much insight and power-and in Winter Prey, his shattering New York Times best-seller, Sandford tells his most ice-blooded tale of all. Minneapolis Lieutenant Lucas Davenport has tracked killers in cities across America. But even he may be unprepared to face the savage murderer hunting human prey in the Wisconsin woods this winter.
