Corruption of blood

When Congress reopens the JFK case, Manhattan Assistant D.A. Butch Karp is tapped to head the investigation because he has the best homicide prosecution record in the New York D.A.'s office. He is the man who has tried over a hundred cases and lost not one. But barely has he left the department and his family for the nation's capital when he finds himself facing Washington power plays at their most cynical: evidence and testimony show up contaminated, and funds for the investigation remain meager.

The pressure from above is to rehash the Warren Commission's dubious lone-gunman conclusion and to make certain no new ground is broken.

Plunging ever deeper into the dangerous intricacies of a conspiratorial web spun by murky elements of the CIA and a self-serving Congress, Karp finds his witnesses are either hostile - or murdered. And when his wife, Marlene, a veteran prosecutor, joins him, they unearth evidence that is suspiciously conflicting or somehow just vanishes mysteriously.

Worse, Karp, Marlene, and their team of New York cops, lawyers, and forensic specialists are stalked by an assassin with an uncanny resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald. In a race measured in microseconds, they must penetrate to the source of conspiracy that strikes at presidents with impunity - before its lethal fallout finds them first.