Burned-out private detective and self-styled shit magnet Michael McGill needed a wake-up call to jump-start his dead career. What he got was a virtual cattle prod to the crotch, in the form of an impossible assingment delivered directly from the president’s heroine-addict chief of staff: unearth the backup Constitution the Founding Fathers devised for a time of crisis. In the government’s eyes, that time is now, and they want to use this Secret Constitution to drive the country back to a time when civility, God, and mom’s apple pie were all that mattered.

Like Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley before him, Warren Ellis deflty exposes the hypocrisy of the moral majority, giving us a glimpse at the monstrous outcome that their overzealous policies would achieve.