WHERE DID AMERICA GO WRONG? DID IT ALL START WITH FAKING THE MOON-LANDINGS? Once-successful, now laid-off ad guy Tom Hammock is entangled in a Manhattan realtor's job he hates, beleaguered romantically by his hard-charging boss, Cerise, beset by his not-quite-ex-wife, Kate, a crusading TV journalist for "Second America," and demoralized by the daily dystopia in Washington and the country's six years in the economic meat grinder. Still, Tom has everything under control until he is confronted by the sudden death of Boon Juster--his long-estranged high school hero, baseball team mentor, and romantic rival, as well as the fourteenth and last man to walk on the moon. Without any explanation, Boon has named Tom his executor, leaving him a trail of ambiguous clues about his state of mind and the reality of his feats as an astronaut, the most famous of which was smuggling a baseball aboard the Apollo 18 lunar lander and swatting the juiciest hanging curveball in the universe. Tom's chaotic, four-day odyssey to discover the truth involves a Georgetown-based "consultant" who looks after the final delusions of "astronuts," the discovery of a secret room filled with tantalizing hints about a government hoax, the confessions of Babe Ruth's "niece," a predatory Wall Street banker who's the money behind the übercapitalist PAC, REV-Up America!, and a "too perfect" photograph of Boon Juster hitting the home run on the moon that may or may not expose the perfidy of NASA and Tricky Dick and shatter the iconic image of one of the last Great American Moments. The search for answers ultimately leads Tom back to the original scene of the crime--Spotswoodie, the baseball-mad prep school that he starred for as a pitcher--where all the characters harassing him converge in a tumultuous, darkly comic, all-American finale full of surprises about love, death, and our country's "exceptionalism"--and facing down the tyranny of youthful dreams.