Home > Meet the Authors > Tom Layne

by Tom Layne

The Assassination of Rush Limbaugh by dentist, businessman, historian, and now author Tom Layne is the story of two immigrant families in search of the American dream. The family from France takes up law, politics, and police work, while the Sicilian family descends into a life of crime. For the better part of a century, the families. courses fatefully intersect and intertwine until, in the climax, the youngest descendant of the French family finds herself in a losing race to prevent the hit man of the organized crime family from shooting America's number one talk radio personality.

Along the way, readers go to artillery training and World War I combat with Harry Truman. They experience Truman's angst for the Presidential decision to use atomic bombs on Japan and they go ashore with American troops invading Sicily in World War II. Readers sit in the courtrooms where three historical trials change the legal face of America. They experience the life of an American Mafiosi from birth through his membership in a violent Brooklyn street gang to his rise to the inner sanctum of a New York crime family.

Readers tune in to the development of talk radio, and the fear it instills in politicians, from its first broadcast at the 1915 San Francisco Worlds Fair to today's round-the-clock diatribes. They sit in on closed-door meetings where that fear gradually leads powerful politicians to plot the murders of the two most popular talk show hosts.

Readers feel the icy fear and terror in the minds of two victims of exotic and deliberate murder by a hit man whose very name means nightmare in Italian.

And finally, readers get to know Jodie Farmer, as she goes from adolescent to college pal of a mafia captain's son to heroic FBI Special Agent. They feel her take a terrorist's bullet while foiling a nearly successful plot to kill tens of thousands in America's northwest. And they're by her side in the climactic gun battle inside Rush Limbaugh's Florida mansion.