Ask Not

Nathan Heller #15

by Max Allan Collins

Chicago, September 1964. Beatlemania sweeps the nation, the Vietnam War looms, and the Warren Commission prepares to blame a "lone-nut" assassin for the killing of President John F. Kennedy. But as the post-Camelot era begins, a suspicious outbreak of suicides, accidental deaths, and outright murders decimates assassination witnesses. When Nathan Heller and his son are nearly run down on a city street, the private detective wonders if he himself might be a loose end. . . .

Soon a faked suicide linked to President Johnson's corrupt cronies takes Heller to Texas, where celebrity columnist Flo Kilgore implores him to explore that growing list of dead witnesses. With the blessing of Bobby Kennedy—former US attorney general, now running for Senator from New York—Heller and Flo investigate the increasing wave of violence that seems to emanate from the notorious Mac Wallace, rumored to be LBJ's personal hatchet man.

Fifty years after JFK's tragic death, Collins's rigorous research for Ask Not raises new questions about the most controversial assassination of our time.

Genres: Mystery, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Audiobook, Crime, Suspense, Noir

320 pages, Hardcover

First published October 22, 2013

About the author

Received the Shamus Award, "The Eye" (Lifetime achievment award) in 2006.

He has also published under the name Patrick Culhane. He and his wife, Barbara Collins, have written several books together. Some of them are published under the name Barbara Allan.

Book Awards
Shamus Awards Best Novel winner (1984) : True Detective
Shamus Awards Best Novel winner (1992) : Stolen Away
Shamus Awards Best Novel nominee (1995) : Carnal Hours
Shamus Awards Best Novel nominee (1997) : Damned in Paradise
Shamus Awards Best Novel nominee (1999) : Flying Blind: A Novel about Amelia Earhart
Shamus Awards Best Novel nominee (2002) : Angel in Black

Japanese: マックス・アラン・コリンズ
or マックス・アラン コリンズ

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best of the Nathan Heller series is a series of three books that Heller has written about President Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, including: (1) Bye Bye Baby about the last days of Ms. Monroe's life and the mysterious things about her tragic end, which seemed to also involve connections to the Mob and to the Kennedy brothers; (2) Target Lancer about an attempted JFK assassination in Chicago weeks before the Dallas tragedy and the links to anti-Castro groups and Jack Ruby and others; and (3) the lastest Nathan Heller masterpiece: Ask Not, which is about the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.

Yes, there have already been a few other books written about the Kennedy assassination and one or two of them are actually worth reading, but none will take the reader deep into the mysteries surrounding the assassination as this one does. It begins by setting the time period. The Beatles are playing and Heller is providing security and manages to get his teenage son Harrison's autograph on a napkin that the son clutches until the two walk outside and are almost run down by a car. It was dark out and it could have been accidental except that Heller thinks that one of the people in the car was one of the Cuban assassins he encountered in Chicago in Target Lancer. Someone might be trying to tie up some loose ends and Heller thinks he's one. Heller sets about putting out the word that he is not a loose end and that his son is off limits.

Meanwhile, Heller has a client in Texas whose husband has been part of a series of strange suicides. Somehow they don't appear to be suicides to him and they are all linked somehow to witnesses to the Dallas shooting. Heller isn't planning to investigate the Kennedy assassination. The Warren Commission is taking care of that. But, he finds himself dragged deeper and deeper into it as he, along with a famous reporter, interview people who knew Ruby in the clubs and, if there was a conspiracy, loose ends are being tied off. There's a theory here about the shooting and it doesn't involve any magic bullet.

This is an incredible book that is worth reading from cover to cover. If you have any curiousity about what happened in that book depository and on that grassy knoll, read this. You won't regret it.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

New Review! ASK NOT: A Nathan Heller Thriller is Max Allan Collins' usual top-notch thriller-writing. Third in his JFK trilogy, it's got everything: Murders, mobsters, CIA honchos, and the Beatles in Chicago. Exciting reading even if you don't remember where you were on That Awful Day.

My 4.5-star review is at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud. C'mon, what's a simple mouse-click between friends?

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heller finds himself involved in the JFK assassination. Like many baby boomers, MAC never really got over this, and it shows. We get the whole narrative about how the arrival of The Beatles gave them permission to quit mourning.

Heller goes to New Orleans, to assure the mafia boss there, then heads to Dallas, where he becomes involved with various strippers, and a Dorothy Kilgallen composite. He investigates the lay of the land, and finds Dallas is a lot more dangerous than it looks.

I probably like this book more than some in the series because I agree with MAC's theory. On the other hand, it seems like he put more passion than usual, without going completely down the rabbit hole.

Recommended.

[Tim Schneider · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collins ends his JFK trilogy with Nate Heller investigating the JFK assassination in Dallas and New Orleans. It also pulls in Billy Sol Estes' shenanigans and Mac Wallace and the allegations he was LBJ's hatchet man. And, of course, Flo Kilgore, the Dorothy Kilgallen stand-in, is there investigating the assassination as well. And Collins manages to give us the Cubans, the CIA, the Mob and the Texas oil men. Let's have ALL the conspiracies.

Honestly, after Target Lancer, I would have been happy if Collins and Heller had left JFK alone. I felt like he got that out of the way and I'd have been fine with him moving on. Nothing about this changed my mind. This is not a great Heller book. For long periods he's just floating through the book not taking a particularly active role. The JFK assassination just has had so many millions of words written about it, along with numerous movies, TV shows, etc. I thought that Target Lancer gave us something new and fairly interesting. This was just rehash.

Don't get me wrong...it's readable. Collins is a dependable writer. But this is easily my least favorite Heller novel thus far

[Mark Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Nathan Heller series is a work of historical fiction genius and M.A.C. writes some of the best Hard Boiled literature around of any era. Period.

This installment finishes Collin's JFK trilogy and while its inter-working of fiction and fact is seamless as usual this is also the most static of all the Heller books. Nate spends most of the book as a secondary observer instead of the active participant that he usually is.

However, there is this issue that has begun to drive me crazy. It is the endless fashion description of not only the hero, all his female acquaintances but also of most every other character no matter how minor. I understand that clothing descriptions can help set the stage and mood of an era but even in the middle of a sidewalk kidnapping we get the run down on the togs of all involved. Hey, I lived through this era, if I needed this minute a detailed representation of 60's clothes I could just check my closet and people that didn't live way back then aren't going to Google the brand names to fill in their imaginations.

Reading the last couple of Heller novels has been sort of like perusing the latest Sears and Roebuck mail-order catalog. I assume that most people who read novels of this genre are much less interested in fashion detail than adventure, violence, blood, guts and maybe a topping of gratuitous sex mixed into a believable historical time stream. I realize that Heller has gotten much older, much richer but nix on the GQ and focus more on the story.

Okay, MM has been murdered, the assassination attempt in Chicago has been foiled (sort of),there is nothing left for Nate to do but go to Dallas and uncover the real story behind the JFK murder.

So he does.

The tenor of the denouement is pretty well telegraphed by the previous two books in the trilogy and of course the fate of the major characters are fixed by reality. However, Nate seems to be stuck with a lot less historical wiggle room in which to work his reality legerdemain than in previous books . On some level it doesn't feel right for Nate to be mostly an outside observer of other people's actions and even his interactions seem irrelevant to the actual events; but hey, it is all true - mostly

[Randy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been a fan of the Heller novels for many years now. Mr. Collins is now getting into territory I lived in. I remember the Kennedy assassination, seeing Ruby shoot Oswald on live TV, and a couple of years later the Beatles arriving on our shores.

ASK NOT concludes the author's JFK trilogy and begins with Heller and his son, Sam, nearly getting run down coming out of a Beatles concert. Heller is working for them and arranges a meet(I'm the same age as Sam at that time and would have loved to be in his place).

Heller recognizes the near hit-and-run driver as one of two Cubans he'd nabbed a couple of years before in Chicago in an aborted assassination of the President.

It starts him on a path to stop whatever's going on. Threats to himself he can deal with, but family is a different matter.

As always, Collins and his researcher George Hagenauer do a massive amount of research and weave his fictional detective Heller in with real people of the day to develop the story. He stays close to the truth, using his own speculations and those of others, to give us a coherent tale while admitting a few changes for dramatic purposes.

He has more plans for Heller, though originally the JFK trilogy was to wrap it all up. Glad to hear that.

[Johnny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Using the first two words of the most famous line in John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address as the title of a Nathan Heller novel should telegraph something right away. Ask Not weaves the old private detective through the intricacies of the most famous conspiracy ever officially denied at the highest levels of government. Max Allan Collins is brilliant at blurring the lines between authentic history, speculative history, and imaginative fiction. Some actual figures appear in the pages of these novels and some are composites of historical figures and Collins’ creative construction.

Carlos Marcello appears in Ask Not as he did in James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (another Kennedy conspiracy novel I read this year). The latter dealt with Operation Mongoose, the ill-advised partnership between the CIA and the mafia to off Castro. Ask Not is tied to the disappearances of witnesses who might have called the Warren Commission Report (Lee Harvey Oswald as lone gunman) into question. Heller starts out investigating staged suicides which appear to be related to the Billy Sol Estes scandal. Ironically, Collins notes in the epilogue that he ordered Sol Estes’ autobiography from the con man’s own website, a book that never arrived. So, to be conned by the con man who opens the novel seems terrifically interesting.

I wasn’t sure, until I read the back matter, why Collins hadn’t simply used Dorothy Kilgallen, the real-life Reporter Who Knew Too Much (a book I read about 1.5 years ago), as a character instead of fashioning a composite character named Flo Kilgore. I found out that he had mashed together several reporters in the first two books dealing with the assassination conspiracy and kept the fictional reporter (which had Kilgallen’s “DNA” in her, of course) for Ask Not. I don’t think this is a spoiler for Ask Not to indicate that the circumstances of Kilgore’s death in the book are exactly the same as those with Kilgallen’s death. I was also intrigued to find that Max Allan Collins, like me, saw Oswald shot live on television and has never been satisfied by the lone gunman (or “lone nut”) theory.

Although the resolution of Heller’s investigation is extremely satisfying from a fan’s perspective, it is highly improbable. I will concede that Collins set up the unexpected turn of events fairly with a short description several chapters before it was needed, but I don’t think the characters involved would have been quite that sloppy. If you read Ask Not, you’ll see when you get there. But I love the way a certain villain gets his in a similar way to how his victims were killed. The fact that I read in the back matter that the bad guy died under strange circumstances in real life that Collins is able to fold into decisive action from Heller was delightful.

I never tire of reading these fictional versions of history from Collins. There is just enough factual evidence combined with intriguing speculation to give me some fascinating considerations. Ask Not is just as good as, if not better than, the rest at doing just that.

[Andy Rausch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another homerun for Max Allan Collins and Nathan Heller. Well-written and well-researched. Collins has an amazing talent when it comes to mixing fact and fiction. I've been reading Collins' work for decades, and he never lets me down. Bravo, Mr. Collins! You keep writing them, and I'll keep reading them.

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve never read a good novel or novelistic treatment about the JFK assassination — and that includes Libra and Mailer or anyone else. Because it’s like Trump, the reality is more bizarre than any imagination could conjure, and that’s what gives any “imaginative” treatment a tin ring.

[Gram · Rating 3 out of 5]

The final part of Max Allan Collins' "JFK trilogy" sees private eye Nate Heller aid a journalist -Flo Kilgore - a fictionalised version of journalist & TV personality Dorothy Kilgallen - uncover some unsettling witness stories about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22nd 1963. Most of the action takes place the year after the Dallas assassination and the killing of the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, by Dallas nightclub owner, Jack Ruby. Even in that short time, quite a few witnesses (all of whom gave evidence at variance with the "long gunman" theory) have been murdered, committed suicide or died in suspicious circumstances. Outwith Flo Kilgore's investigation, Heller goes asking questions of his own as he's none to happy that someone tried to kill him and his son.
Heller's own inquiries involve the FBI, Cuban exiles, the CIA, Mafia bosses - even people close to JFK's successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson. The plot is marvellously convoluted and it's clear that Max Allan Collins has done his Kennedy assassination research well. Historical and crime fiction fans will enjoy this lively thriller.

[Lisa Carlson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Interesting premise and cover shot as we are approaching the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination ; but the writing never allowed me to become vested. Too disjointed and difficult to follow. I found myself re-reading passages. Gave up after the first 50 pages.

[Benedict J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Max Allen Collin’s continues his series of books about the assassination of JFK with a fascinating foray into who may have engineered the plot and the coverup. Collin’s appears to have delved deeply into the contemporary sources to weave together a plausible scenario.
Using his fictional hero, private eye Nate Heller. Heller is enjoying a weekend with his college age son ,including attending a live concert of The Beatles on their debut tour in the US. It was the highlight of the dad- son weekend before college started. They were having a great time until while leaving the concert venue, someone in a very fast car attempted to run over the Nate and his son as they crossed the street. Nate had one clue who and why: Two Cuban- looking thugs were in the car. Thugs just like the one a Mafia boss had on his payroll, shooters hired for foiled plot to kill JFK when he was in Chicago a few months before. ( See previous Nate Heller book, Target Lancer.)
The plot in Ask Not is a complicated one. The reader must be attentive to all the threads Heller unravels and ties together. All conspirators, all the conspiracies get tied in a messy bow. Many famous names , and some not so well known, all the historic locations from Dallas to New Orleans are in the story. It all holds together, though, because as time has gone on, we have learned much more than was known back in days following the murder. Many people died suspiciously ; many pieces of evidence have disappeared. But the interest in that. horrible day in Dallas goes on.
The entire Nate Heller series of historical mystery novels is worth reading, but especially the part that weaves around Heller’ s involvement on the murderous fringes of TheMob versus the Kenned family.
Cautions: violences, sex, sordid characters and crooked , evil politicians. So, what’s new…..

[Richard Block · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dead Kennedy

MAC tackles the Kennedys in a 3 book series - this is the last of them, dealing with the Kennedy assassination. It is the usual mix of true crime and noir fiction, with his Nate Heller, now in his late 50's at the centre of things as usual. For those readers familiar with this long running series, this is a very good entry, marred a bit by the large amount of conspiracy stuff that comes with the territory. In short, most of the book is exposition about the assassination, rather than live action. When the story is bound by exposition, it is interesting but not that exciting. When the action starts, MAC and Heller go up a gear.

As in the first Heller series, I read the last one first. So now I'll have to get back to the first two, which is a challenge as the first cannot be obtained easily, even in Kindle. This is a pain, but you can read any of his books with enjoyment, whether they are out of order or not.

If you never read a Heller book, this is a lousy place to start. By the time of this one, the hero is a successful, middle aged name dropping tough guy - not as attractive as he was at the outset, or in the first 6 or so efforts. But MAC writes well enough, and this one is about right (300 pages, not like the 625 page Stolen Away, covering the Lindbergh kidnapping). It is very good on the Kennedy assassination and you will
never think of LBJ in the same light.

[Louis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've enjoyed the Nate Heller mysteries for decades. Max Allan Collins has fashioned a compelling hybrid in Heller, the hard-boiled historical whodunit. One aspect of this series that I enjoy is the fact that Collins' solutions to real-life mysteries (the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Black Dahlia killing) may be fictional. After all, these are novels. Then again, they could be what Collins believes to be the solution. Keeping that in mind, his solution in this book is to the most notorious crime of the era in which Heller works: the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

If you expect this book to come down to a simple debate between the grassy knoll or a lone gunman, you will be surprised by the conspiracy unearthed by Heller. Months after reading it, I'm still debating the possibility that it is not just fiction. Either way, I found it compelling and a gripping read.

[Mark Schloemer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Giving this 5*s due to the fact that I’ve read many many non/fiction books regarding the assassination of JFK. For the most part they are (at best) complicated, and drill down on one “possible” scenario, whereas Max Allen Collins (historical fiction) captures the “era” and rolls the essence of possibilities in a free flowing style. If you’re not into history, but would like a “bit” of knowledge about that day in Dallas, give “Ask Not” a spin; you’ll end up knowing about as much as anyone else. -:)

[Peter Ackerman · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the worst entry I have read so far in the Nathan Heller series. The author puts his kooky Kennedy assassination beliefs and places those in an otherwise threadbare story. Basically it felt to me that Heller merely walked through the book going from character to character and getting conspiracy theory (pages and pages of it at a time). Otherwise there is not much to the plot. Disappointing to say the least.

[John Yingling · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Highly enjoyable historical fiction with, to put it mildly, a colorful cast of characters, some from history and others fictional. I'm always fascinated by stories related to the JFK assassination. Even the way out theories and those believing it was a conspiracy to kill the president are worth reading. I don't mean to be glib about one of the darkest days in American history and the related events, but this was a fun book to read.

[Jeff P · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books you can't put down after you get started. It is the third book in the author's JFK series, so now I have to go back and read the first two, Bye Bye, Baby and Target Lancer. Maybe Oswald was just a patsy...

[David Hay · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read Not.

[Dave Medicus · Rating 5 out of 5]

My head is still spinning from reading this book. So good! A righteous conclusion to the marvelously entertaining and eye popping JFK trilogy featuring the always reliable Nate Heller.

[Michael Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Conspiracy Much

Enjoyed Ask Not as I do most of mMAC Books. Space, However I am not a conspiracy Fanatic. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone Assassin.

[David Blake · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always..

[Dlr MacKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-researched historical crime thriller. Not my usual taste but I'm glad I read it and will be reading the rest of the series (which covers several decades).

[Jeff J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

#15 in the Nathan Heller series. Nate investigates the suspicious deaths of Kennedy assassination witnesses.

[Mary Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a detective type story, with sex and danger. The story was rather flat, there was no emotional involvement in the story. It was an interesting idea, but it did not pull me into the story.

[Lorraine Montgomery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ask Not by Max Allan Collins, deals with the mystery of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Collins' fictional detective Nathan Heller helps journalist/ game show panelist, Flo Kilgore (rather loosely based on Dorothy Kilgallen) track down witnesses to the assassination of President Kennedy, witnesses who offer conflicting information to that which is being gathered by the Warren Commission. Some witnesses were already dead less than a year after the shooting; some die shortly after talking to Heller and Kilgore, but all die under suspicious circumstances.

It's 1964 and the Beatles are invading North America with their music, clothes, and hair style, and Heller's A-1 detective agency has bloomed and spread. He is now a relatively wealthy man who doesn't need to get his hands dirty taking on cases personally. That is, until he and his son, Sam, are almost run over after the Beatle concert at Chicago's International Ampitheatre by a Cuban in a sedan that aimed straight for them. With Heller's connections to the mob, the CIA, the former attorney general Bobby Kennedy, and a failed, combined action to kill Castro called Operation Mongoose, Heller thinks just maybe he's a loose end that someone wants eliminated. Totally unrelated at first glance, a client comes in whose husband died in what appeared to be a suicide; he was connected to a big fraud and murder case against Billie Sol Estes (connected to President Johnson) where other witnesses had also committed suicide — one who shot himself 5 times with a rifle before hooking himself up to the tailpipe of a car. The insurance company wouldn't pay off to Heller's client because of the suicide label. Heller heads to Texas to talk to Clint Peoples, the Texas Ranger who's been gathering evidence. The suspected murderer leads Heller to more "suicide" victims who were witnesses to the assassination of President Kennedy, and suddenly, it's a whole new can of worms.

This story is well-grounded in history and Collins explains in an afterward who is real and who is based on real people, sometimes a conglomerate of people into a single character in his novel, and who is totally an invention to add to the story. The suspense is often palpable and the characters quite believable. LBJ is portrayed as ruthless and one of the chief movers behind the assassination. He is also linked to the "clean-up" man suspected of eliminating witnesses. The Kennedys don't come off scott free in Operation Mongoose or the Marilyn Monroe death. There are lots of connections to events of the time, CIA involvement, New Orleans mobsters, and Texas oil.

Since the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976-78) concluded that a conspiracy was responsible for the death of President Kennedy (finally agreeing with 81% of the American public according to a Gallup poll around the same time), not a lone sniper as the Warren Commission had concluded, re-looking at witness deaths, lost evidence, and walking the scene according to what people reported seeing in this semi-documentary novel makes sense for those of us who watched in disbelief as Jack Ruby gunned down the "lone gunman", Lee Harvey Oswald. There are many books and movies that deal with the conspiracy theory in the JFK assassination and Collins mentions many of them at the end of the book. Given the settings of many of the enquiries, I suppose the amount of gratuitous sex in the novel is understandable, and the language used by the mob boss, especially in the early appearance in the book, as well but I could have done with less of it. Aside from that, I thought it was a well-reasoned plot with logical conclusions. It is the third in a JFK trilogy. I may go back and read the first two, but not having read them didn't lessen the enjoyment of an interesting, and often tense, rendering of what happened in Dallas, Nov. 22nd, 1963, and its aftermath.

[Gloria Feit · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this final volume in the JFK assassination trilogy, Nat Heller is caught up in investigating events in Dallas that November 22nd, drawn into the story behind the murder of the President, when he finds out about a series of suicides and suspicious deaths surrounding the case of Billy Sol Estes, who was famously convicted of fraud. Suddenly he sees a parallel, as witnesses to the event in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza also seem to disappear by suicide, “accidental” death or murder.

“Ask Not” follows the previous novel, “Target Lancer,” which recounts an assassination plot against Kennedy in Chicago mere weeks before his murder. Heller, who in the previous entry played a pivotal role in putting together elements of the mafia, CIA and other groups as a go-between in the effort to assassinate the Cuban dictator Castro, now finds himself, and possibly his son and ex-wife, in the cross-hairs in what appear to be an effort to clean up “loose ends” left over from the failed effort called Operation Mongoose. This sad affair presumably gave rise to the theory that Castro was behind the Kennedy assassination. But that does not stop the author from proposing other conspiracy theories as well, including Texas oil men and even LBJ.

Mr. Collins researches his novels extensively, and wherever possible uses real life people as characters, including Robert Kennedy or fictionalized persons based on real ones, such as Flo Kilgore, who more than resembles Dorothy Killgallen, columnist and TV personality. Whether or not there is any authenticity to the conspiracies told in the novels, they are always entertaining, and the novel is recommended.

[Sherri · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Ask Not" is my first Max Allan Collins novel. It is not going to be the last. I listened to it via Recorded Books, Inc. Mr. Collins created a story that is filled with facts versus theories intertwined with conspiracy.

As a young girl, I lived through the Kennedy years and was in 7th grade when President Kennedy was assassinated. November 22, 1963 began non-stop television viewing. I watched Walter Cronkite cry when reporting the President's death. Two days later saw Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas police basement on live TV. I watched The Ed Sullivan Show when The Beatles were his guests, though I was not one of the screaming, fainting fans. Watching "What's My Line" was a ritual in our home. Visual images of my youth were rampant as I listened to this story.

To be able to combine research and imagination into one fast-paced novel is a wonderful talent.

I enjoyed this story. A great concept for a good read.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book that focuses on the historical history, now evident, of the assassination of JFK. The book was widely researched for accuracy, by the author Max Collins. It focuses on a Private Investigator, Nate Heller, and his connections, research, interviews etc. of mob members,cubans, Jack ruby etc. The complexity of the assassination was intricate and far spread.Over the years, most of those who knew things and spoke of them have been mysteriously done away with. Lyndon Johnson was a key player in this conspiracy. The one thing I didn't particularly like about the book was the sex with Heller and the strippers he knew...I felt it really didn't add to the story and was rather crude.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of a surprise. This is a factual-as-possible novel about the conspiracy theory version of the Kennedy assassination. I learned a lot, and found a new series of books to start reading. It isn't clear on the cover, but this is the third book of a trilogy dealing with the assassination. The other two are Bye Bye Baby, which is about Marilyn Monroe's death, and Target Lancer which is the assassination itself. Ask Not is about the mysterious deaths of many of the witnesses who did not agree with the Warren Commission findings.