Allen Eskens

"College student Joe Talbert has a writing assignment to interview a stranger and write a brief biography. With deadlines looming, he heads to a nearby nursing home to find a subject and meets Carl Iverson. Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran--who has been medically paroled after spending thirty years in prison for rape and murder. As he writes about Carl's life, Joe cannot reconcile the heroism of the soldier with the despicable acts of the convict....

Cub reporter Joe Talbert, Jr. investigates the murder of a man with the same name as him in a small town in Minnesota and discovers the deceased was a loathsome lowlife who may be his father.

"Homicide Detective Max Rupert never fully accepted his wife's death, even when he believed that a reckless hit and run driver was the cause. But when he learns that in fact she was murdered, he devotes himself to hunting down her killers. Most of his life he had thought of himself as a decent man. But now he's so consumed with thoughts of retribution that he questions whether he will take that last step and enact the vengeance he longs for. On a...

"After fifteen years of growing up in the Ozark hills with his widowed mother, high-school freshman Boady Sanden is beyond ready to move on. He dreams of glass towers and cityscapes, driven by his desire to be anywhere other than Jessup, Missouri. The new kid at St. Ignatius High School, if he isn't being pushed around, he is being completely ignored. Even his beloved woods, his playground as a child and his sanctuary as he grew older, seem to be...

"Max Rupert has left his position as a Minneapolis homicide detective to live in solitude. Mourning the tragic death of his wife, he's also racked by guilt--he alone knows what happened to her killer. But then the former local sheriff, Lyle Voight, arrives with a desperate plea: Lyle's daughter Sandy and his six-year-old grandson Pip have disappeared. Lyle's certain Sandy's ex-husband Reed is behind it, but the new sheriff is refusing to investigate....