...is a pudgy, bearded 28-year old Army veteran pedaling a rusty bicycle across West Texas. He carries nothing but a dagger, a canteen, and a backpack full of Old Testament puppets.  His name is Harvey Matusow.

There's something broken inside Harvey Matusow.  He’s never been able to decide who he's supposed to be. Ever in search of himself, he is constantly reborn — soldier, clown, Communist, ex-Communist, FBI informant, D.C. socialite, truth-seeker, paid liar, whistleblower, con man.  He is a man who feeds the sense of his own mythology with each transformation, often oblivious to the wake of personal destruction it leaves behind. After meeting Matusow, Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam wrote: "Maybe this man is everything he says he is. Maybe he's a psychiatric case."

One thing is clear to Harvey Matusow: lying pays, big time. Barely 28, Harvey has rocketed to national celebrity as a star government witness and political spokesman for Senator Joe McCarthy. He’s celebrated by adoring fans. He’s married a millionaire socialite. His words carry the power to grip the nation — and to tip the scales of justice. For a short time, Harvey thinks he’s finally become the picture of success that he’s been searching for, even if by unscrupulous means.

The catch: Harvey’s fame has been built on a mountain of bald-faced lies. The secret to his success is a compulsion to fraudulently name names and invent increasingly outlandish stories about accused communists across the country. It didn’t take him long to realize that if he could fool the country once, doing it again and again, would be easy. And it’s a good time to do it; rampant public paranoia and the politics of fear have enabled Matusow's brand of opportunism to thrive in the big business of paid informing. It’s a perfect storm measured by countless victims and their collective loss — loss of jobs to fear-mongering, loss of freedom to trumped-up prosecutions, and loss of life to depression and suicide.

The dirty truth: The government is paying him to keep it up. The Justice Department and FBI know exactly what kind of an imposter Harvey is, and still present his lies as irrefutable truth. Even the notorious Roy Cohn has taken Harvey under his wing along the way, so he may blossom into a formidable soldier in McCarthy’s army. And it’s worked; in a few short years, Harvey has transformed himself from an aimless barfly and failed magician into a member of the American anti-communist elite, paying no regard to the lives he's ruined along the way.

But it's only a matter of time before the shape-shifting Harvey transforms again.  Summer, 1954: Harvey claims a dubious “religious conversion” and searches out Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam for an impromptu confession about his checkered past.  It's a salacious revelation, one which quickly makes its way into the headlines.  Amid rumors that he plans to write a bombshell exposé detailing the government’s complicity in his public sins, Harvey abruptly disappears into the vast American Southwest.

"Every resource should be devoted to it."  By October, the FBI's most wanted man is Harvey Matusow, born again while wandering dusty back roads, his dark eyes scanning the desert horizon for the one thing that's eluded him — a true understanding of himself.  The Matusow manhunt of 1954 has begun.

Albert E. Kahn can't help himself. For the blacklisted co-owner of a tiny, struggling New York publishing firm, news of Harvey's disappearance sounds a siren call to battle injustice. His business is going under, his heart isn’t in great shape, and if he takes on the government, who knows how his young family will survive intimidation by an agressive FBI and death threats from a hostile public. But Albert is a prize fighter of singular focus and never passes up a chance to play the spoiler, especially when it’s in the name of those who can’t fight for themselves.

To Albert, Harvey's memoir is the last hope to exonerate dozens of wrongly accused Americans, most notably among them his close friend Clint Jencks, who faces prison thanks to Harvey’s lies against him. Despite the professional reservations of his partner, Angus, and the personal objections of his wife, Riette, Albert races against the FBI to find Harvey. Before long, Albert will embark on a perilous and painful journey which will stake his firm, his freedom, the unity of his family, and his own health, on his ability to convince the elusive, erratic Harvey to confess his lies. Lies that, if revealed, could upend McCarthyism's stranglehold on American politics and shake the country to its core. But this victory may come at a cost: Albert is blind to the fact that he may be unwittingly setting the stage for the resurrection of the monstrous Roy Cohn.

Where others see disaster, Roy Cohn sees a golden opportunity. The nefarious power broker, de facto executioner of the Rosenbergs, and scheming consigliere to Senator Joseph McCarthy has fallen from grace, publicly humiliated by the recent Army-McCarthy hearings. An unrequited love has clouded his judgement and caused him to commit the greatest sin against himself: he’s been made a fool and let himself be cast out of power. Exiled from Washington, Roy is becoming an even darker, more twisted version of his former self as he yearns for return and revenge at any cost.

To FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joe McCarthy, Harvey's recantations threaten devastating PR crises, or worse, investigations against them. But to Roy, any accusation that Harvey makes about their entangled past is a chance to position himself back where he belongs: the intersection of gossip and power. Roy sets himself on a collision course with Harvey, the stakes of which are vindication for the victor and prison time for the vanquished. To get there, he will use his ability to manipulate the press, political back channels and knack for demagoguery in an effort to squash Harvey while fulfilling a destiny which he has yet to define.

And so begins an epic struggle of wit and will. While Albert and his ragtag team of underdogs fight to bring the truth about Harvey's lies to light, powerful government operators, including Roy Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joe McCarthy maneuver to derail the publication and credibility of Matusow's book False Witness. For Albert, his publishing team, and his family, every new twist of intimidation and maneuvering intensifies the terrifying risk that if the going gets too tough, Harvey will transform once again, betraying them all.

It is a contest in which each side is driven by its own sense of righteousness, at times blindly and in the face of overwhelming odds.

Can Albert secure Harvey’s confession before the government silences him? Or before his wife, Riette, and their young family crumble under assaults from all sides?

Will Harvey take Roy’s bait, sending him to prison and returning Roy to power?

Does Harvey come clean? And at what cost? Perhaps the answers to these questions lie in the eye of the beholder, much like the notions of truth and virtue that define this story. But one thing is certain: in the end, Harvey, Albert, and a supporting cast of alternatively sympathetic and repugnant characters carve an indelible mark on one of America's most tumultuous epochs, a period that changes our nation in ways which reverberate perhaps most loudly these very days. To find the origin story for today’s brand of con man politics, look no further than the McCarthy era and its warnings against rampant fear-mongering, assaults on the truth, and mass manipulation.

The con man’s lasting lesson is a stark one: Fool them once, shame on me. Fool them twice, shame on them.