Herbert Brewer's Dirty Little Secret is the first in a series of savagely funny, social-adventure novels calculated to appeal to the readership that has made Douglas Adams, John Kennedy Toole, Terry Pratchett and Tim Dorsey so successful. When the fictional nation of Amsarnie becomes reluctantly involved in the politics of a foreign war, Prime Minister Dereck Cartright is appalled to discover that his country's armed forces only really exist as an expenditure statistic. Under extreme pressure, Dereck conceives a plan to create an army by drafting young men from areas of low, electoral participation. Claust is a notoriously tough, industrial, desert town with the worst record of political apathy in the country. Claust matriarch, eighty-three-year-old Jenny Won Baker operates the town's premier brothel with a passionate, maternal energy. Encouraged by the leading citizens, Jenny engineers bizarre scheme to confuse the draft that transports the whole country to the very brink of civil war.