Local Iowans and the national press corps crowd the front yard of Roswell Garst's farmhouse. Among them protesters brandish signs shouting Death to the Commies and Better Dead Than Red. They've gathered this Monday in September 1959 for the much publicized visit of Soviet Union Premier Nikita Khrushchev to the American heartland.On Tuesday, in the idyllic Iowa town of Black River Falls, the anti-communist slogans of the right-wing demonstrators assume a disturbingly prophetic truth for Richard Conners, a high-profile political writer with leftist sympathies and a very jealous fifth wife. With a hammer and sickle painted in blood on his forehead, he turns up dead at the office of fledgling lawyer and private investigator Sam McCain.McCain does not want for suspects. For one, there's Karl Rivers, whose antipathy to communism has proved to be too rabid even for the FBI, and there's the fanatical America Firster Jeff Cronin for an obvious other. Within the next twenty-four hours, however, they too are dead. The case becomes still more complicated for McCain when Rivers's magnetically blonde sister, Natalie, drives into his life in a sexy blue '54 Nash and Conners's inscrutable assistant, Margo Lane, breaks into his bachelor apartment with more than his choice rock-and-roll record collection on her larcenous mind.That Conners was murdered for his politics, everybody, including McCain's sometime employer, the imperious Judge Esme Anne Whitney, surmises. McCain, however, is not so certain. He's learned that murder usually proves to be more personal in Black River Falls. Read Less