minnesota

"In 1980s Minnesota, when auditions for a concert with Prince are announced, 16-year-old Rosa Dominguez, the daughter of a tyrant ballet master, is desperate to escape her pointe shoes and show everyone what she can do"--Provided by publisher.

As part of his thirteenth birthday Jimmy Benge is spending a week ice fishing with his friend, Ryan, in northern Minnesota at his Cherokee family's lakeside home; one day they get permission to go out further on the lake to try for Northern pike, and Jimmy catches a beauty--but a sudden snow squall turns the situation dangerous and as the boys pack up to make their way back, Uncle Kenny's ATV flips over and he is injured, and it is up to the boys have to get everybody home safely.

"Johnny spies a pheasant which he believes is sleeping and his Grandma fears is dead, but they learn they were both wrong when the pheasant departs, leaving behind a gift"--Provided by publisher.

It might have been the end of days. Instead it was the beginning of something shockingly new. They called the comet Cain, after the astronomer who discovered it. It passed 500,000 miles from Earth. We were spared planetary destruction and granted a light show like no other. But, one year later, Earth span into the debris field left by the comet and a meteor storm struck. Roads, buildings and even a small town were annihilated. The meteors impacted heavily around the dying mining town of Northfall, Minnesota. It was the night of a mysterious double murder, the deed overshadowed by the discovery that the burning remains of the rock contained an unknown substance more precious than gold: the Ninth Metal. And with that discovery, everything changed.

In Southeast Minnesota, down on the Mississippi, 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 before them is whether to authorize the killing of a local reporter. The vote is four to one in favor. Meanwhile, not far away, Virgil Flowers is helping out a friend by looking into a dognapping, which seems to be turning into something much bigger and uglier; a team of dog-nappers supplying medical labs, when he gets a call from Lucas Davenport. A murdered body has been found, and the victim is a local reporter.

Class reunions: a time for memories; good, bad, and, as Virgil Flowers is about to find out, deadly. Virgil knows the town of Trippton, Minnesota, a little too well. A few years back, he investigated the corrupt, and as it turned out, homicidal, local school board, and now the town's back in view with more alarming news: A woman's been found dead, frozen in a block of ice. There's a possibility that it might be connected to a high school class of twenty years ago that has a mid-winter reunion coming up, and so, wrapping his coat a little tighter, Virgil begins to dig into twenty years' worth of traumas, feuds, and bad blood. In the process, one thing becomes increasingly clear to him. It's true what they say: High school is murder.

Minnesota cop Virgil Flowers teams up with an Israeli cop who is tailing a man who has 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.

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.

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. He soon comes to realize 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.

Virgil Flowers, an investigator with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, is pulled from a fishing tournament to take the case of a murder at a nearby resort for women only, and his queries reveal a second murder the year before, and the very real possibility of a third about to happen.