Right out of the 1980s and the Cold War, a nostalgic trip to a typical Washington intrigue. Senator Marvin Winters, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, is found dead at his home in circumstances suggesting suicide. Mrs. Winters does not accept her husband"s death as a suicide and retains Jackson Learned to investigate. Jackson Learned operates a consulting firm in Washington, D.C., specializing in corporate and political wrongdoing. Learned learns that the day before Senator Winters died a pouch was stolen from a military courier. It contained the plans for commercializing controlled hydrogen fusion, the "power of the sun”, a feat not previously anticipated before another twenty years. The technology of hydrogen fusion, which is described in some detail, is taken from actual Energy Department research reports. Many parties are interested in the fusion plan: American and British oil executives, the Saudis, Mexico and the Soviets. Not to forget are a Pentagon general, two Senate staff aides, a secretary, the scientist who discovered the fusion breakthrough. Patton leads us through a traditional murder mystery with the wonderful "locked room" crime solved by Learned and the perpetrator exposed in a meeting of all the suspects. Car chases, a hunt in the mountains of Ireland, nighttime surveillances and a bloody shoot-out, and Learned"s ambiguous relationship with a woman on his staff, give Patton’s work its fast-paced, suspense thriller-like character… and of course a surprise ending.