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Ask Not    by Max Allan Collins Amazon.com order for
Ask Not
by Max Allan Collins
Order:  USA  Can
Forge, 2013 (2013)
Hardcover, e-Book
* * *   Reviewed by Mary Ann Smyth

Ask Not by Max Allan Collins tries to put to rest the controversy over who killed President John Kennedy. Of course, Collins' take on the assassination is speculation. But – ah, the great word but. He has fictionalized the whole of what he calls a conspiracy while managing to include a great deal of fact.

After November 22, 1963, the Warren Commission puts the blame for Kennedy's death on Lee Harvey Oswald, declaring that Oswald was working on his own. No others were in a conspiracy to change the man in the President's seat. Strangely though, after this, a number of accidental deaths and suicides occur – one man is alleged to have shot himself in the stomach five times with a rifle!! – as well as outright murders. Assassination witnesses drop like flies.

Nathan Heller, head of his own worldwide detective agency, is called in to look into all the strange happenings in D.C.. Heller and his son are the target of a hit-and-run. This, of course, raises Heller's ire and he is drawn into an investigation that brings in an old friend, Flo, an investigative reporter. Together they track down undesirables as they attempt to unravel what truly happened in Dallas on that day we will never forget.

The implications revealed by Collins seem too outrageous to be true. But perhaps he has put his finger on what really went down. Hard to contemplate, but believable. Collins has taken a complicated event that changed the world and made sense of it. Though I hate to think there are that many wrong thinkers around who are willing to do others' biddings with no thought for those involved.

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