The last pumpkin paper
Subtitle: a novel
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1996
Number of pages: 267
Description: The case had everything. A high government official accused of espionage. The unexplained, violent deaths of key witnesses. Tainted evidence. Crooked prosecutors. Rumors of homosexual blackmail. Secret microfilm hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin. And an ambitious young congressman named Richard Nixon, who knew that a guilty verdict was his ticket to national fame.

You're thinking: Oh, that case. Old news, right? Ancient history. Well, that's exactly what they want you to think - as Joe Pope is about to find out. Back in 1948, Pope was a congressional investigator helping Dick Nixon send Alger Hiss to jail. And, sure, they cut a few corners, stretched the truth here and there - but Hiss was guilty, so what's the difference?

Now it's October 1989. Pope's trying to enjoy his retirement in Key West when Nixon tells him there's one last reel of microfilm out there - one last Pumpkin Paper - that could "rewrite the history of the twentieth century." Only one man knows where it is. And it's up to Pope to find him before the secret vanishes into the chaotic final days of communist East Germany.

From Washington to Berlin, from the opening of the Cold War to the razing of the Wall, The Last Pumpkin Paper unravels a fifty-year-old conspiracy of blackmail, espionage, and assassination on both sides of the crumbling Iron Curtain. Here's the Alger Hiss case solved at last, and another earth-shaking mystery or two cleared up along with it. Of course, you'll think it's only fiction - but that's exactly what they want you to think.