Deep Freeze

Virgil Flowers has been to Trippton, Minnesota before, and the visit did not leave him with fond memories. Some years ago he looked into the town's school board and found corruption that ended in murder. Now Trippton is back on his desk, and the news is worse: a woman has been discovered dead, frozen inside a block of ice.

The investigation points toward a high school class that graduated twenty years earlier and is planning a midwinter reunion. Virgil, an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, bundles up against the cold and starts working through two decades of old wounds, rivalries and grudges among the former classmates. The more he uncovers, the more it seems that some of the people who walked those school halls never let go of what happened there.

This is a Virgil Flowers novel by John Sandford. It pairs a bleak, snowbound small-town setting with a mystery rooted in the long shadow of adolescence, and it follows Virgil as he works out who among the old classmates is capable of murder.