Five Dark Riders

The President of the United States is coming to Dallas, Texas, where he will make a major speech and ride through the city in an open limousine - and where a sniper with a high-powered rifle will be waiting in a sixth-floor window to assassinate him. Despite many eerie similarities, the time is not November 1963; it is June 1936. And the assassin's intended victim is not John Fitzgerald Kennedy but Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The story begins when the body of a murdered teenager is discovered on a remote South Texas farm in what first appears to be an isolated crime of passion. But when sheep farmer Adam Wagner, on whose property the body is found, and schoolteacher Ellie Velasco, the murdered youth's cousin, join forces in an attempt to track down the killer, they stumble onto an intricate plot by five Nazi espionage agents personally assigned by Adolf Hitler to kill FDR. Adam and Ellie are an unlikely team. Ellie is a beautiful Hispanic woman with a deep distrust of all Anglos - Adam included -- because of a disastrous incident involving a friend of Adam's when she was a young girl. Adam is a World War I veteran left cynical, disillusioned, and mildly disabled by wounds suffered in France. But as they investigate further, they realize that they are the only two people in America, other than those directly involved in the assassination plot, who know what is about to happen. They try desperately to alert the Secret Service and FBI to the danger, but their warnings are either ignored or succeed only in drawing suspicion toward themselves. When FDR begins a train trip to Texas to visit the state's Centennial Exposition, and unknowingly heads toward a deadly rendezvous in downtown Dallas, the couple decides that their only hope of saving his life is to try to thwart the assassins on their own and against all odds. What follows is a breathless race against time with earth-shaking implications that sweeps them steadily deeper into a web of international intrigue - and their own intensifying love affair. Meanwhile, the future of the entire nation rests on whether they succeed or fail. * Five Dark Riders is a fact-based historical thriller populated with numerous real people, ranging from FDR and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and senior Secret Service agent Edmund Starling, and it is filled with historically accurate incidents and situations. It tells in factual detail the story of the almost-forgotten trip to Dallas that the Roosevelts actually made 27 years before the Kennedy assassination.