SAVE THE LAST DANCE FOR ME

The nation is trembling on the brink of the ’60s, but life goes on as usual in Gorman’s Iowa. Though beauteous Pamela Forrest, Sam McCain’s hopeless inamorata, has fled to Kansas City with her married swain, Sam’s found an equally unsuitable new woman to love: Black River Falls Clarion reporter Kylie Burke, whose irresponsible husband’s straying doesn’t seem to justify her own. Meantime, Richard Nixon’s upcoming campaign stop at Cedar Rapids has the townsfolk gently polarized along predictable lines. But one group’s anti-Kennedy fervor isn’t so gentle. Rev. John Muldaur, an itinerant preacher who’d rather handle snakes than papists, is convinced that the Jews stockpiling weapons beneath Catholic churches are behind Kennedy’s campaign, and that one of the hundreds of enemies his zealotry has earned him wants him dead. Can Sam find out who? Extending his record as the world’s worst bodyguard (Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, 2001, etc.), Sam visits one of Muldaur’s garage services just in time to see his would-be client keel over dead of strychnine poisoning. When the more orthodox Rev. Thomas C. Courtney becomes a second murder victim, Sam has to wonder whether somebody’s targeted the county’s clergy—and whether he can really trust idiot police chief Cliffie Sykes to do the right thing when there are so many tempting false targets for his dread power.

Once more, the affectionate period detail bears out both halves of Sam’s observation that “everything was just okey-dokey here in the land of Lincoln. But we knew better, didn’t we?”