DEAD RINGER

At great personal risk, disgraced Secret Service agent Joe Mingus and Jesuit history professor Juan Verdugo follow encrypted clues to find long-hidden truths about the JFK assassination—and solve another murder.

First Verdugo and then Mingus receive the clues from Mingus’ former girlfriend, Olivia Heller, a National Archives researcher, after someone kills her over her discovery of materials proving Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. Her murderer is a crazed Cuban exile working for billionaire Mark Cristanti, a primary contributor to the presidential campaign of right-winger Jonathon Connor. For Cristanti, Kennedy’s killing was a “course correction” made necessary by JFK’s reneging on his promise to take down the USSR rather than ease tensions: “Were it not for our action in Dealey Plaza, the USSR would still exist to this day.” For the support of Cristanti’s secret extremist faction, the Movement, Connor promises to eradicate the progressive cause and bring about the “next” theocratic America. Mingus, reduced to working as a bouncer at a Baltimore strip club following 20 months in prison on a felony conviction, is determined to avenge Olivia’s killing. A succession of Jeopardy!-like clues lead him and the devout but increasingly game Verdugo to Oswald’s house in Texas, where killer bees protect a cache of secrets behind the walls, and New Orleans, home of D.A. Jim Garrison, whose investigation of the assassination led him to believe the CIA and the Mafia were involved. Borrowing from puzzle master Dan Brown, Hauty concocts an entertaining plot with a great payoff. Naming the protagonist Mingus, after the towering jazz legend, is a bit distracting and even off-putting; another character is named after country great Wanda Jackson. But he overcomes that with his ability to make this seemingly exhausted piece of history fresh.

Back to the grassy knoll in this surprisingly engaging thriller.