Charlie Blair of Wyoming and Lauren Miller of New York start out as strangers. They are drawn together by an appalling hate crime and by their mutual passion for justice. Yet they share more than a sense of fair play. They are not simply kindred spirits but actual kin, descendants of immigrants who met on a boat on their way to America, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

Special Agent Blair of the FBI has the numbing job of a bureaucrat and the soul of a cowboy. A nearly burned-out case at thirty-four, he is about to walk away from the safe world of paper-pushing to risk his life in Wyoming, infiltrating an armed, white supremacist, viciously anti-Semitic group called Wrath. Wyoming born and bred, Charlie seems the perfect choice for this undercover operation, because who in Wrath could question this whiter-than-white man, so clearly one of their own?

Also in Jackson Hole is Charlie's apparent opposite. Gen-X Lauren Miller is articulate, ironic - and unwaveringly liberal. A journalist from Long Island, she has been hired by the Jewish News to investigate a bombing that Wrath is suspected to be behind. Lauren's job is to know who, what, where and when, of course. But most of all, she is compelled to discover why. Why are all these people who've never met a Jew in their lives obsessed with Jews - and why do they want them dead?

Just who is it who gets to define who is an American?