THE SPIDER'S WEB is a rollicking romp of murder, intrigue, and duplicity populated with a robust cast of colorful characters sure to amuse (and confuse) as the twisted plot races to its connect-the-dots farcical conclusion. The wholesale assassination of four Supreme Court justices sets in motion a riddle that sparks the curiosity of Ridge Walker Trueheart, an Oglala Sioux and special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By chance he stumbles onto a most unlikely suspect in the person of one Annabelle "Happy" Holiday, a country mouse who has all the wits and wherewithal to ght the city rats to a standstill. Clever though she is, she eventually falls victim to a judicial system that imposes the public rights of "eminent domain" over private citizens and property, and she loses what little she had. Motive for revenge?
Trueheart, an American Indian all too familiar with powerful, avaricious people seizing lands that were not theirs, empathizes with her cause at the same time he is trying to ferret out whether Happy was complicit in the deaths of the justices. From the president and vice president of the United States, to the directors of the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI's Counterterrorism Division, to a brutal Mafia don with axes to grind, everyone has secrets to keep and hatchets to bury. And lurking in the ghostly shadows is the lovely and lethal Dakota Kilgore, whose identity and purpose are enigmas to be unraveled.
Mired in the mix are Texas and multi-media billionaires bent on preserving the security and sanctity of the country while callously circumventing the founding principles that made it great in the first place. Caught in the cross re are Trueheart and his alluring fellow traveler, two patriots everybody thinks, for them, would be better off dead.
David R. Branon, a Harvard magna cum laude graduate, was the chief executive officer of a very successful business that was ultimately folded into a worldwide sporting goods conglomerate. He became chairman of that entity's multi-million dollar Americas operation before strapping on an early parachute to pursue the passion of words rather than the sterility of numbers, however lucrative the latter may have been. His debut novel, The Curmudgeon's Tree, was met with high praise. He lives with his wife in Greenville, South Carolina.