Title: Blood and Thunder
Release: August 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93759-5 (1995 Hardcover), 0-451-17976-5 (1996 Paperback)
Publisher: Dutton (1995 Hardcover), Signet (1996 Paperback)
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The place is Louisiana.  The time is 1935.  Huey Long, the Kingfish, former governor, current U.S. senator, and absolute dictator of this sweet Southern state, is riding high.  He has become the most potent challenger to the Presidency, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt has good reason to fear the next election.

Nathan Heller, president (and everything else) of the A-1 Detective Agency out of Chicago, has been lured to New York by Long's trusted adviser to present Huey Long with a birthday gift.  The gift is a bulletproof vest, and the message is quite clear.  Huey Long, with his indomitable quest for power, has made one enemy too many.   Rumors of a plot to assassinate Long are circulating, so Heller is hired to uncover the truth.

But saving Long's life may be the biggest challenge of Nathan Heller's career--if he himself lives that long.   From his passionate and (he thinks) secret affair with the woman Long spurned to his plot to infiltrate Long's known enemies, Nathan Heller walks a dangerous line, and at any time could lose his already precarious balance.   Nathan Heller finds, though, that nothing can keep Huey Long from his destiny, and suddenly, in a fiery burst of gunfire, he knows this is far from the end of his case.   It's just the beginning.

From the posh parlors of New York's upper crust, to the murky depths of Louisiana politics, Blood and Thunder boils with page-turning excitement and the authentic atmosphere of 1930s America.  Once again, Max Allan Collins presents a birlliant solution to a crime that still haunts a nation decades after the fact.  Suspense fiction just doesn't get any better.

Publishers Weekly: Starred. "As always, Collins's sense of place and time is unerringly acute, and he happily indulges in re-creating Long's fiery stump style. Although Collins has carved out a mystery subgenre that he occupies nearly alone, he and his detective would be a tough act to follow even if they did have a serious rival or two."

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