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Minneapolis deputy police chief is given a political hot potato to solve as bodies and body parts start appearing around town.

Whenever you hear the sky rumble, that usually means a storm. In Virgil Flowers's case, make that two. The first comes from, of all places, the Minnesota zoo. Two large Siberian tigers have vanished from their cage, and authorities are very concerned that they've been stolen for their organs. Traditional Chinese medicine prizes their parts for home remedies, and people will do extreme things to get - and keep - what they need. As Virgil is about to...

"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...

They call them Travelers. They move from city to city, panhandling, committing no crimes -- they just like to stay on the move. And now somebody is killing them. Lucas Davenport's adopted daughter, Letty, is home from college when she gets a phone call from a woman Traveler she'd befriended in San Francisco. The woman thinks somebody's killing her friends, she's afraid she knows who it is, and now her male companion has gone missing. She's hiding...

At 1:15 a.m, a Minnesota political fixer answers his doorbell. The next thing he knows, he's waking up on the floor of a moving car, lying on a plastic sheet, his body wet with blood. When the car stops, a voice says, "Hey, I think he's breathing," and another voice says, "Yeah? Give me the bat." And that's the last thing he ever knows. Lucas Davenport is investigating another case when the trail leads to the man's disappearance, then--very troublingly--to...