Ask Not
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About this ebook
Decades after JFK's tragic death, Max Allan Collins's rigorous research for Ask Not raises new questions about the most controversial assassination of our time.
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.
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Max Allan Collins
Max Allan Collins is a New York Times bestselling author of original mysteries, a Shamus award winner and an experienced author of movie adaptions and tie-in novels. His graphic novel Road to Perdition has been made into an Academy Award-winning major motion picture by Tom Hank’s production company. He is also the author of several tie-in novels based on the Emmy Award-winning TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
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Reviews for Ask Not
16 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Excellent. I thought at the time that Johnson had a lot to answer for
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5With Nate Heller working solo on his new case, the A-1 staff was taking on the bread-and-butter jobs while Nate went to Texas, trying to sort out a life insurance claim being processed in Evanston Illinois with malice and a foul on the policy issuer because of possible pressure from LBJ's handlers of inconvenient FBI investigations. A suicide was posited for an Illinois office-manager with injuries that looked like he had been knocked out prior to being subjected to CO. The grieving wife, a daughter of a family friend from Nate's police force days, was struggling because of the insurance office ruling. and the wife stepped into the A-1 office to try to find a solution to their financial plight. The deceased office manager was linked to a fraudulent business owner named Billy Sol Estes from Texas who was connected to LBJ through a variety of shady money schemes. He was linked to the fraudulent Estes by unfortunately becoming an alarmed whistle-blower to the FBI who apparently had loose cannons shooting out the names of whistleblowers to concerned LBJ supporters. Nate's travel to the Waco Texas Ranger Headquarters to sort this out comes as a sequel his nearly being killed while crossing the street with his son by some Cubans who have stomping grounds in Texas. This 1964 case was developing from the events surrounding the violent end of JFK and the takeover by LBJ. A pattern of intimidation of people who have information and may have shared it with different government agencies rears its ugly head in Nate's life.Nate is busy trying to escape the snares of the assassins, protect his ex-wife and son, and still offer protection for hire to other potential current or former whistleblowers, but the roster of assassins is large due to the mob organizations, the Cuban divided radicals, the Vice President with a grudge and a big staff, and the turned alphabet agency agents. Although the wife's plight at the start of the trail of fire is solved rather quickly, Nate ensnares himself by agreeing to help a mudraking journalist celebrity named Flo with further collection of witness tales from the JFK assassination. He hasn't been able to shake the blood-money men from his trail. This fictional detective story is a hard-boiled, profane, and sophisticated novel that was masterfully written. The clues about JFK's last month have been unearthed and appear to be widespread with pointers to who, what, when and why in the triangulation set-up. Read it and feel the resonance to current events. Now, another group with different ties tries to silence the reporters.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The 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. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Pass on this one if you're looking for a hard-boiled PI investigation. This time around Nathan Heller is playing second fiddle to Flo Kilgore a reporter seeking to shed light on the conspiracy to assassinate JFK. Only in the last pages of the book is there real 'Heller' action.