Jake Hines

Rutherford, Minnesota, is a sparsely populated town not typically known for lawlessness or violent crime. But a string of suspiciously professional burglaries is keeping Captain Jake Hines busier than usual. Then a murder victim is discovered in a suburban home that also happens to be a marijuana farm and meth lab. Suddenly Rutherford isn't so quiet, and Hines pulls in all his detectives to investigate. While the victim has no identification on him, a small Mass card written in Cyrillic is found hidden in his jacket. That gives Jake an unsettling thought. Could this man be connected to a ruthless Eastern European gang that has started operating in Minnesota?

Chief of Detectives Jake Hines? new-parent nightmares about an impending ecological disaster on a Minnesota farm have a deadly real twist. Forced to choose between the land they love and the easy money they'd get if they sold it to sand miners for oil drilling, a hard-working Minnesota farm family resorts to loud family fights. But when the body of the best farmer of the group is found in the trees behind the field where Chief of Detectives Jake Hines is hunting geese on his day off, the discussion becomes deadly serious.

A Minnesota police detective is plunged into corporate intrigue and cutting-edge science when a biochemist is found dead at his desk . . . Rutherford, Minnesota's Property Crimes division has been busy. The town has had fourteen office break-ins in just five days-though nothing seems to have been taken. With GMO foods a growing industry in the area, controversy has been swirling, and threatening notes have been left by an environmental group. But curiosity turns to alarm when a lead scientist is found dead at his desk at one of the sites. As the small start-ups that received the messages are damaged and frightened by sneak attacks, Jake Hines and his team must embark on a steep learning curve. They're not sure whether the professor's death has to do with his pioneering scientific work, or something more personal . . .