STRAW MEN is an historical novel that's set in motion when, on July 2, 1881, Charles Julius Guiteau shoots President James Garfield in a Washington, DC train station. It quickly became apparent that Guiteau was a lunatic - he loudly proclaimed that he had acted entirely on his own, having been instructed by God to "remove" the President in order to save the country. But was Garfield's assassination truly the work of a deranged, lone gunman? The Byzantine political alliances that America's Gilded Age had inherited from the trauma of Civil War, together with the tangled, and very public, personal relationships of the country's most powerful leaders at the time, pointed toward the clear possibility of a larger, darker political plot. Had Guiteau, wittingly or not, merely been the sharp end of a well-disguised political conspiracy leading to a coup d'etat? The nation's doubts had to be put to rest, so the Secret Service - formed during the Civil War to combat an epidemic of counterfeiting - was called upon to mount a national investigation designed to sort out the whole truth behind Guiteau's attack. The shocking story that's gradually uncovered in the course of this investigation reveals that all the players, great and small, in this densely complicated historical drama were being set up and used for one hidden purpose or another.