Heat Lightning - John Sandford

BCA agent Virgil Flowers got a call from his boss to go to Stillwater. A body had been dumped at a veterans' memorial with a lemon in the mouth, shot twice in the head with a .22 caliber pistol. A similar case had been happened in New Ulm. In the course of the investigation, Virgil Flowers found that the killers had targeted more people and that he had to find the connection among those victims, tried to save them and stopped the killers. It all began in 1975 in Vietnam...

This is the 2nd Virgil Flowers book and I still think the pace is quite slow. I believe that like me, by the middle of the book, readers would have known why those killings were done and by whom. When the cops still think the killer is one of the men in the group, the readers know that they are outsiders. But of course the readers know that the victims are tortured to gain information, while the cops think it is because the killer is a lunatic.

The ending was very good, involving political issues and the fictional governor made a brave move. I don't really understand the title, whether it has another meaning, but it was used to describe the weather at the time the story in this book took place. I also don't get the lemon thing. A professor who was doing research on long-term after-effects of the Vietnam War told Flowers: "When the Vietnamese execute a prisoner, they'll gag him by stuffing a lemon in his mouth to keep them from talking while they're walking out to the wall." But later when Flowers tried to confirm it, every body he talked to said that it was a joke.