Ward Hopkins, a former CIA agent, in pursuit of the straw men, among the wooded canyons in the vicinity of the town of Yakima, Washington, finds an eerie and cruel picture: the body of a man tied to a metal pole in such a way that it seems that he is walking towards a certain place . Next, another human corpse is discovered, and not far from it is a hut full of dead bodies. Ward understands that the time for passive actions has passed and the time has come to move on to an active search for the secret conductor of this entire bloody symphony... Marshall's novel is an absolutely unique phenomenon in the world of modern detective fiction. This large-scale thriller immediately made the writer a leading master of the genre.