On one of the coldest nights in Minnesota history, the difference between life and death is literally the blink of an eye for Phil Broker, until recently St. Paul’s most successful undercover cop. That blink will convey the urgent warning of a comatose man who knows the dark truth binding Broker to a remarkable cast of characters — a weary anesthesiologist, a brilliant surgeon, a wealthy novelist, his ex-wife (a reformed exotic dancer) and her unrepentant pimp.

For Broker it all began when he agreed to take three big-city professionals on a canoeing trip across Minnesota’s most remote lakes. One of the three is horribly injured in a freak October blizzard, and Broker embarks on a white-knuckle rescue against time and the elements, ending with a writer in a coma and his accountant dead. Suspicious of foul play, Broker follows a twisted trail of manipulation and revenge that leads back to the writer’s beautiful wife — and a ring of men caught in a deadly competition for her affections.

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Phil Broker’s latest adventure hits close to home, when he finds his estranged wife and daughter caught in a web of deception that may conceal a terrorist plot to bomb Minneapolis’s nuclear power plant

When Phil Broker’s estranged wife, Nina, and his daughter, Kit, disappeared months ago, he wasn’t surprised. Nina has a mysterious and dangerous job working for the government, and her work has taken her in harm’s way before. Broker sets out on a mission to find Nina and force her to choose between life as a soldier or a mother, and take Kit out of danger once and for all.

At the end of Vapor Trail, Broker learns that Kit has been abandoned by Nina at a motel in Langdon, North Dakota. But when he arrives, the situation is far more complicated than he imagined. Kit is, bizarrely, accompanied by a “babysitter” named Jane, who claims to be Nina’s estranged girlfriend. Buddy Yelton, a local legend and hopeless womanizer, has apparently taken up with Nina. But Buddy Yelton is no harmless local–he has hidden connections to the Aryan Nation, and possibly Middle Eastern terrorists as well. And two motel guests are equally mysterious–Broker can’t help thinking he remembers them as former GIs he knew back in Laos in ’72. Obviously, all is not as it appears–and more than Kit’s life is in danger–the fate of the entire Minneapolis-St. Paul Metro area is in Broker’s hands.

Reunited with estranged husband and undercover cop Phil Broker, Nina Pryce takes an extended medical leave from the army to recover from the injuries–physical and psychological–she sustained at the hands of a vicious psychopath. The Broker/Pryce household relocates to a remote resort town of Glacier Falls, MN, where daughter Kit is enrolled in second grade at the local elementary school. Everyone assumes that Kit is adjusting well–until she punches Terry Clump, the terror of the second grade, in the face. He gets a bloody nose and she gets suspended. What begins as a seemingly minor spat between innocent kids quickly escalates into a vicious scenario of lawlessness and provocation. Kit’s imitation of her parents’ violent proclivities has put them all in harm’s way: the Clumps are but one-half of a notoriously vengeful “clan” known for criminal behavior and brutal violence.

A nameless sniper is targeting participants in popular Civil War battle reenactments, and Minnesota reenactor Paul Edin is killed at the mock Battle of Kirby Creek, near Corinth, Mississippi. His death is ruled an accident, but Paul’s widow, Jenny, discovers that the sniper’s bullet was meant for the man standing next to Paul, a cop named Kenny Beeman. To penetrate the Mississippi smokescreen, Jenny enlists the aid of her former lover, news photographer John Rane. Appealing to be covering a story, Rane pokes into the Tennessee-Mississippi border country and teams up with Beeman. With demons nipping at his heels, Rane picks a Sharps rifle and live ammunition and heads off to the Shiloh Battlefield–and a showdown with a killer.

South of Shiloh is a pulse-pounding thriller from a master of the genre–a story that uses a popular national pastime as the springboard for a riveting listen.