After a series of killings that disturbingly emulate the works of a trio of inmates currently being held at the Minnesota Security Hospital, Lucas Davenport investigates a missing man who was released from the hospital weeks earlier.

Danger stalks Lucas Davenport at work and all too close to home when petty thief and paraplegic Randy Whitcomb targets Lucas's pretty fourteen-year-old adopted daughter and a young man with the .50 caliber sniper rifle and the right-wing-crazy background roams through the city filled with the most powerful politicians on earth.

Lucas Davenport has seen many terrible murder scenes. This is one of the worst. In the small Minnesota town of Wayzata, an entire family has been killed -- husband, wife, two daughters, dogs. On the wall, in blood : "Were coming." No apostrophe. There's something about the scene that tugs at Lucas's cop instincts -- it looks an awful lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution he's seen in drug killings sometimes. But this is a seriously upscale...

Thanks to some very influential people whose lives he saved, Lucas is no longer working for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension but for the United States Marshals Service, and with unusual scope. He gets to pick his own cases, whatever they are, wherever they lead him. And where they've led him this time is into real trouble. A Biloxi, Mississippi, drug-cartel counting house gets robbed, and suitcases full of cash disappear, leaving behind...