Two bodies turn up at the Vietnam War Memorial in Minneapolis with lemons inserted in their mouths. Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers can find nothing linking the victims to Vietnam or each other and no explanation for the lemons. But one of the victims had recently been attending support-group meetings at the local veterans' center and, according to his girlfriend, had also taken to carrying a gun when he walked his dog. Virgil, an unconventional investigator whose improvisational skills compensate for lack of an overall strategy, looks into the support group and turns up a link between the two victims and their involvement in a decades-old scam to move abandoned heavy equipment out of postwar Vietnam. Mix in the suspicious death of an old spy in Southeast Asia and the last-minute meddling of a couple of officious Homeland Security twits for a typically entertaining Sandford caper. Flowers, who began his literary life as a bit player in Sandford's Prey series, is more than capable of carrying the load as he makes his second featured appearance. He may even be more interesting at this point than Prey star Lucas Davenport, who knows who he is and is very settled in his life. Virgil is still feeling his way along, and it's fascinating to observe his metamorphosis.

Sandford, who seems determined to keep Lucas Davenport's latest cases secret, allows him to be upstaged once more by his junior colleague Virgil Flowers, though this time there's no great honor in star billing. The Stillwater police call Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) to the veterans' memorial where the body of building inspector Bobby Sanderson has been deposited. He was shot twice with a .22 and found with a section of lemon in his mouth – all details that echo the recent death of title searcher Chuck Utecht in New Ulm. The two murders are clearly the work of the same killer, but who is he, and why has he taken such ritualistic care to incriminate himself by emphasizing the similarities between two crimes that ordinarily wouldn't have been connected? More to the point, are these two crimes only the beginning? For readers new to this sort of fiction, Sandford helpfully provides brief conversations indicating that Chippewa Indian Ray Bunton and ex-cop John Wigge, a VP at a private security agency, had better watch their backs as well. Prompted by Lucas and driven night after sleepless night to assemble the facts, Virgil (Dark of the Moon, 2007, etc.) 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. The suspects include Ralph Warren, Wigge's sinister boss at that security firm; Professor Mead Sinclair, a lefty researcher on the Vietnam War who just might be in bed with the CIA; his half-Vietnamese daughter Mai, who makes her extracurricular interest in Virgil plain from the get-go. Although the prose sounds like Sandford, the plotting is a letdown: The trail to the last act is rich in incident, but not original, urgent or compelling. On the other hand, the very last surprise, climaxing a turf war between the BCA and the Department of Homeland Security, is a honey.

At the start of bestseller Sandford's solid second thriller to feature officer Virgil Flowers of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (after Dark of the Moon), a gunman shoots Bobby Sanderson as he's walking his dog one night in Stillwater, Minn., then places a lemon in the dead man's mouth. Sanderson's killing is one in a series, and Flowers soon discovers that all the victims served together in Vietnam. When Flowers learns that Vietnamese firing squads stuck lemons in the mouths of their human targets, he pursues leads in the local immigrant community, where he hooks up with the attractive daughter of a radical professor who'd written a paper about Agent Orange. Eventually, he settles on the owner of a security company involved with the upcoming Republican National Convention as his prime suspect. While the less than credible plot builds to a highly unlikely resolution, most readers will enjoy spending time in the company of the genial Flowers.