The Republicans are coming to St. Paul for their convention, and crashing the party are a few hard cases the police would rather stayed away. Chief among them is a crew of professional stickup men who've spotted opportunities ranging from political moneymen with briefcases full of cash to that armored-car warehouse with the weakness in its security system. All that is headache enough for Lucas Davenport--but what's about to hit him is even worse.

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...

Whenever you hear the sky rumble, that usually means a storm. In Virgil Flowers' case, make that two. 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...