In southeast Minnesota, down on the Mississippi, a school board meeting is coming to a close. 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 a local reporter should die. And the vote is four to one in favor. Meanwhile, not far away, Virgil Flowers is doing a favor for a friend by looking into a dognapping, which seems to be turning into something much bigger and uglier -- a team of dognappers supplying medical labs -- when he gets a call from Lucas Davenport. A murdered body has been found -- and the victim is a local reporter.
A Pulitzer-winning American journalist, John Roswell Camp was asked to write the _Prey_ series of novels under the pseudonym John Sandford. With the popularity of that series, he continued to use the same pseudonym for subsequent novels, including even the sequels to Camp's earlier Kidd novels.