Lucas Davenport knows why people kill. Some do it for thrills. Some do it for profit. Some do it because they must. But when his team guns down two bank robbers in the middle of a heist, Davenport falls prey to the purest, simplest criminal motivation: revenge.
The first body, that of a young woman, is found on a Minneapolis riverbank, her throat cut, her body scourged and put on display. Lucas Davenport, with the Minneapolis Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, knows that whoever did this is pushed by brain chemistry. There is something wrong with him. This isn’t a bad love affair.The second body is found three weeks later in a farmhouse six miles south. Same condition, same display—except this time it is a man. Nothing to link the two victims, nothing to indicate that the killings end here.“This guy…” Lucas says. He took a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. “This guy is going to bust our chops.” And soon he is going to do far, far worse than that…
In the richest neighbourhood of Minneapolis, two elderly women lie murdered in their home, beaten to death with a metal pipe; the rooms ransacked, only small items stolen. It's clearly a random break-in by someone looking for money to buy drugs. But as he looks more closely, Lucas Davenport begins to wonder if the items are actually so small or the victims so random; if there might not be some invisible agenda at work here. Gradually a pattern begins to emerge. But the clues that connect a seemingly random series of murders will lead Davenport to somewhere he never expected. Which is unfortunate, because the killers - and there is more than one of them - are expecting him...