The Plots of Men

It’s April 1934. Much of the world is still suffering from the carnage of the Great War while still reeling from the fallout and economic chaos created by the crash of Wall Street and the Great Depression. Why are Nazis, Communists, gangsters, assassins, spies, lawyers, a Jesuit alchemist, a mystagogue, and a spiritualist gathering in a city in the heart of America’s heartland?

Think Shea and Wilson’s The Illuminatus Trilogy, Brown’s Da Vinci Code, and Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum meet Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley with touches of Wilder’s The Cabala, Gresham’s Nightmare Alley (the novel, not the films), and Amsterdam (the film, not the city).

Has bank robber and Public Enemy Number One, John Dillinger, really been hired to provide security for a shadowy crime organization’s looming secret meeting?  Is Paul Khunrath, a failed German jurist, in the American Midwest to bury his recently murdered wife, really there to obtain paintings intended as gifts to Germany’s new Nazi Chancellor? Is Claire König, a beautiful Eastern European assassin, really in the Midwest to look for and possibly eliminate the source of recent multi-language publications of Protocols of the Elders of Zion?  Will there be murders, biological warfare, poison, Zeppelins, bank robberies, the Illuminati, the Century of Progress, voodoo, shootouts, the Three Stooges, soma, cemeteries, old churches, hidden caverns, Rembrandt, Old Fashioneds, a Harley, alchemy, a séance, art, sausages, Cathars, rituals, fish fries, ghosts and more?

Only one way to find out.