Tall, lean, thirty-something and three times divorced, Virgil Flowers kicked around for a while before joining the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He was on the police force in St. Paul when Lucas Davenport brought him into BCA with a promise that they'd only give him the hard stuff. He'd been doing the hard stuff now for three years -- but he'd never had a case quite like this one.

There hadn't been a murder in the congenial town of Bluestem for years, and in the past few weeks there had been three. A doctor and his wife were murdered in cold blood. And a house explodes into flames with the owner trapped inside. The owner, Judd, was hated by most of the town due to a scam he'd perpetrated on local farmers years ago, so there's no shortage of suspects. If these murders are at all related, there's a very good chance that there's a vicious killer on the loose in Bluestem. Flowers will have to use all his expertise to keep himself off of the growing list of victims.