CY@CY Says Welcome to my dreamscape. Where a Lim is also a Ling.
Heat Lightning is the second book in John Sandford’s series featuring Virgil Flowers, an investigator with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Virgil is an unconventional detective, who wears his blond hair down to his shoulders and dresses in tee shirts bearing the names of often-obscure rock bands.
A gunman shoots Bobby Sanderson as he is walking his dog one night in Stillwater, Minnesota, then places the body at the veterans’ memorial with a lemon in the dead man’s mouth. This murder echoes the recent death of Chuck Utecht in New Ulm two weeks ago. The two murders are clearly the work of the same killer.
Detective Virgil Flowers becomes convinced that the killer is keeping a hit list with many more names on it. He learns at length that all the targets on the kill list served together in Vietnam where they shared a secret worth killing for nearly 40 years later. Chippewa Indian Ray Bunton and ex-cop John Wigge, a VP at a private security agency, seem to be next on the killer’s hit list. And when they both meet their tragic deaths, it is a race against time to find out who is next on the list and who is the killer.
The suspects include Ralph Warren, Wigge’s sinister boss at that security firm; Professor Mead Sinclair, a researcher on the Vietnam War who just might be in bed with the CIA; and Sinclair’s half-Vietnamese daughter Mai.
When Flowers learns that Vietnamese firing squads stuck lemons in the mouths of their human targets, he pursues leads in the local Vietnamese community, where he hooks up with Mai. Virgil loves women and is attracted to lots of them, many of whom return his interest including Mai.
Though this book had an outlandish plot I find it an engrosssing read. And Virgil Flowers is wonderfully likeable