WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW?

What on earth has gotten into the good people of Black River Falls? Instead of observing the courtesies that bond them together into a solid slice of ’50s Americana—except of course when they’re killing each other (Wake Up Little Susie, 2000, etc.)—they’re turning on each other with unprecedented ferocity, accusing each other of disloyalty, treason, and communist sympathies. Inflamed by Khrushchev’s historic 1959 visit to Iowa, an anonymous correspondent sends a blood-red hammer and sickle to bestselling social utopian Prof. Richard Conners. Conners demands that lawyer/shamus Sam McCain investigate the threat, but before Sam can lift a finger to help, he opens his office door to find his client dying on his doorstep, closely followed by all-American school board activist Jeff Cronin and fake FBI agent Karl Rivers, who’d rather be dead than red. Though anticommunist hysteria certainly has the potential to unify all the hostilities sweeping through town, it gets upstaged, as usual, by the loving period detail (a Nash and a Studebaker both feature prominently in Sam’s adventures) and the endless complications of Sam’s triangular love life (Rexall clerk Mary Travers loves Sam, who loves blond heartbreaker Pamela Forrest, who loves lawyer Stu Grant, who refuses to leave his wife Donna). The couplings he enjoys in this installment, however welcome, do nothing to clarify any of them.

What lingers longest in this heartfelt valentine is Sam’s sweetly earnest outlook, which—like that of the town he loves—is not all that far from a child’s.