Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

"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...

In Israel, a man clutching a backpack searches desperately for a boat. In Minnesota, Virgil Flowers gets a visitor: an Israeli investigator. She is chasing a man who has smuggled out an extraordinary relic-- an ancient inscribed stone with startling details about King Solomon. Despite Virgil's first reaction-- that this is a joke, or a movie plot-- it turns out that many people around the world are also pursuing the smuggler, some of them likely to...

Virgil Flowers will have to watch his back--and his mouth--as he investigates a college culture war turned deadly in another one of Sandford's "madly entertaining Virgil Flowers mysteries" (New York Times Book Review). At the local state university, two feuding departments have faced off on the battleground of science and medicine. Each carries their views to extremes that may seem absurd, but highly educated people of sound mind and good intentions...

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.

"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...

"Beloved heroes Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers are up against a powerful vigilante group with an eye on vengeance in a stunning new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford. "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...

Virgil Flowers is only in his late 30s, but he's been around the block a few times, and he doesn't think much can surprise him. He's about to be proved wrong. On a hot, humid summer night in Minnesota, Flowers is in bed with one of his ex-wives when the phone rings. It's Lucas Davenport. There's a body near a veteran's memorial in Stillwater with two shots to the head. The victim has a lemon in his mouth, exactly like the body they found a week ago....

"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...

When protests about a superstore chain's plans to build a location in a Minnesota river town escalate into bombing attacks at the construction site and the company's headquarters, Virgil Flowers races against time to find and stop the bomber.