Rose Buckles, murdered near the Wyoming-Utah line in 1939, isn’t quite buried. Decades later, men from an FDR CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) camp cling to strands of hair.Legends surrounding Rose’s death surface in, of all places, Ukraine during the Chernobyl disaster’s 25th anniversary. Deaths of old men and relatives researching what happened in 1939 have bizarre connections: Murder-suicides in retirement communities, so-called single vehicle accidents, a Chernobyl serial killer, a safe deposit box in one of the Twin Towers in 2001, heroin as a cough remedy, competition between crime families, and even agents working for Putin. The Six-degrees-of-separation theory from Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy’s 1929 short story Chain-Links comes to life, connecting past and present.In 1939, young men at an isolated Utah CCC camp include an immigrant returning to his birth country via the Fourteenth Amendment and an organized crime young man being groomed for mob power. Across the state line in Wyoming, Rose Buckles’ dismembered body is discovered along the riverbank. Are the CCC men involved?Lazlo Horvath from Chicago and Niki Gianakos from Detroit, with feelings of deja vu, become targets of a contract killer when they try to solve the 1939 puzzle. CCC men blasting roads left clues leading Lazlo and Niki, federal and international agencies, and organized crime figures back to the Flaming Gorge, named, not for Rose’s hair color, as elderly locals insist, but because 1869 explorer John Wesley Powell christened it Flaming Gorge Canyon. Before being dammed, Green River flowed fast like blood in a high desert wild horse. Afterwards the river submerged evidence, but Rose’s legend lived on.Exactly what happened in 1939? Follow the deadly history of a decades-long vendetta as it returns home.With bows to Jeffery Deaver, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stieg Larsson, Michael Beres reintroduces his Lazlo Horvath historical suspense thriller series.
