Virgil Flowers (abridged)

It's a hot, humid summer night in Minnesota, and Virgil Flowers is in bed with one of his ex-wives (the second one, if you're keeping count ) when the phone rings. It's Lucas Davenport. There's a body in Stillwater, two shots to the head, found near a veterans' memorial. And the victim has a lemon in his mouth, exactly like the body they found last week.

One late fall Sunday in Southern Minnesota, a farmer brings a load of soybeans to a local grain elevator - and a young man hits him on the head with a steel bar, drops him into the grain bin, waits until he's sure he's dead, and then calls the sheriff to report the "accident". Suspicious, the sheriff calls in Virgil Flowers, who quickly breaks the kid down...and the next day the boy's found hanging in his cell. Remorse? Virgil isn't so sure, and as he investigates he begins to uncover a multigeneration, multifamily conspiracy.