This Far West is a riveting suspense thriller about two ordinary people whose efforts to rebuild their broken families unravel the conspiracy behind a decades-old assassination of a U.S. presidential candidate.
Kevin Columbus had the perfect family. But after his father died in Vietnam, everything came apart. His mother remarried and vanished, and now he’s trying to put his life back together after being downsized from a job.
One day, he gets a package in the mail that suggests his father is alive, and the man who may have sent it – a shadowy ex-CIA agent whose public interest group received and spent millions in secret government funds – is found dead in an apparent suicide.
Kevin’s friend Maxie McQueen, an ex-cop and single mother fighting for custody of her child, is struggling to make it as a private eye after being tossed from the force for nearly killing a racist colleague. Taking on anything that pays to finance an expensive court fight, she accepts a missing persons case with a twist: The subject was last seen 25 years ago, on the New York City street where U.S. Sen. Richard Worth was murdered.
As Kevin and Maxie continue their searches, Walter Frost, a former Worth aide who has become one of Washington’s most powerful players, watches with an alarm bordering on panic. He knows the government can’t, and won’t, allow them to find the truth. Because if they do, a carefully contrived fiction around Worth’s death will collapse spectacularly – as will a pending Mideast chemical weapons treaty whose origins go back to the senator’s death – and put the fate of the nation at risk.
With a supporting cast that includes an Internet muckraker, a mysterious tabloid journalist, and two cyber-geeks who help Kevin uncover the final, stunning secret behind his “perfect” father’s identity, This Far West is a story about the true human costs of family secrets, personal ambition and the pursuit of power.
