Knoll: The Last JFK
Conspiracist. Stephen Hillard. SelectBooks. June 2017. 256 pp. ISBN #: 9781590794214.
Conspiracy
theories abound about who was responsible for the assassination of JFK in
November 1963 but no definitive answer has ever been publicly acknowledged
other than that of Oswald, the supposed assassin. Stephen Hillard’s novel, however, asserts that
the truth is known by many people. The
problem is that each one of these known witnesses or collaborators winds up
meeting a deadly end in horrific accidents or by being murdered.
Now
a House of Representative member from Texas vows to discover and expose the
truth that will hopefully erase the stained reputation held forever in Dallas,
Texas. Columbus (“Bus”) McIntyre, a
prosecutor now must change his plans of running for office when a scandal
derails him from his dream. Remarkably,
he’s not that upset about the change in plans.
In fact, he is now about to change his focus dramatically. One of the great moments of grief in his life
concerns the murder of his father, a cop, in 1970. Now he is given a journal
written by his father in which his Dad writes, “For what I did in Dallas, they
will find me.” From this moment on, the
reader avidly reads every entry of that journal as Bus thinks about each entry
and begins to assemble clues, acts that could just as well get him in trouble
in which he would follow his father’s footsteps.
Woven
into these steps of Bus’s discovery process are chapter in which we learn that
NSA not only has all the facts about the assassination but has a woman design a
program that combines facts and algorithms to know who is searching for the
truth so that they can be eliminated. It
didn’t start out that way but is now a set program that brooks no interference.
Finally,
something about the quashing of people associated with the JFK disaster
concerns a Mafia leader, now dead for over twenty years, but whose legacy is
still continuing the elimination process.
This then is the essence of the story and Bus’s investigative
journey.
There’s
quite a bit of steam that entices the reader but the ending is somewhat
anticlimactic. Still, it will get
readers of a certain age thinking anew of their memories of this horrific event
and hungry to understand precisely what is meant by Carlos Marcello’s dictum,
“Omerta is forever.”
