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 investiagor 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 a lot more personal in Black River Falls.