"Highly literate, insightful, and often hilarious" with "an ingenious and intricate plot."
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 secret room filled with tantalizing hints about a government hoax, 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.
His search for answers ultimately leads him 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 and ironic all-American finale full of surprises about love, death, and our country's "exceptionalism"--and facing down the tyranny of youthful dreams.