The Devil's Good Boys

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was receding in America's rearview mirrors in the summer of 1966 when a gang called the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys began a rash of Dillinger-style restaurant robberies in Gettysburg. Gang members joked and laughed while pistol-whipping frightened diners, cleaning out cash registers and making their tire-roasting getaways in a NASCAR-fast 1949 Hudson Commodore. Corralling these dangerous outlaws proved too much for local and Pennsylvania State Police, until a fatal flaw opened in their victim-selection process. The Mountain Boys thoughtlessly swaggered into an unpretentious mom 'n pop restaurant operated by roughneck ex-Alaskan logger Randall "Blackjack" McGrath. He fatally shot one gang member and dusted the others' britches with his old .38-44 Smith & Wesson Outdoorsman revolver. In so doing, he launched a feud so horrific that the historic Hatfield's and McCoy's affray seemed like a kid's birthday party in comparison. Authentically drawn, furiously paced and often hilarious, "The Devil's Good Boys" thrusts Blackjack's teenage children, Gifford and Tuffy, into a terrifying adult-world reality backlit by vengeful killers, high-level geopolitics and young love. As for the Mountain Boys, they emerge as a band of deadly shadow warriors with a dark mission: the preemptive, methodical, government-sanctioned cleanup of selected journalists, politicians, mobsters, and anyone else who may be called to testify about the Nov. 22, 1963 murder of America's 35th president in Dallas, Texas. Known to Beltway insiders as Operation Group Forty and organized in the late 1950s to kill Cuba's Fidel Castro, Group Forty was "turned" in 1963 to assassinate JFK. Their Gettysburg holdups were conceived as low-risk training exercises and a source of beer money for the hard-partying killers. "The Devil's Good Boys" transports readers to a present-day, high-desert cattle ranch in southeastern Oregon, a chateau-estate beside Italy's Lake Como, the tumult of Times Square in New York City and the ski slopes of Whitefish, Montana. Ultimately, four generations of eccentric McGraths will stand in the breach when Group Forty links arms with a globalist "brotherhood" intent on destroying United States sovereignty and killing ninety-five percent of its population.