This is an entertaining thriller from a popular crime writer. When ninety-four-year-old Ernest Thayer receives a strange summons from one Tim Ferris, postmarked Balltown, Iowa, and promising to tell the whole story behind the infamous Bagley Bunch murders, his journalist's antennae are pricked. But Thayer's health is not up to making a flying visit to Los Angeles, so he calls upon his young protege, Hunt Liebling. Liebling, like his mentor, can smell a good story, especially when it appears to implicate Senator Gary Dixon, a Californian ultra-conservative whose campaign for president is storming ahead of his rivals, and whose career is said to be built on a lie. And so he embarks on a hair-raising mission to uncover the truth and, in the process, risk several lives...