Fiction: Investigating the Kennedy Assassination: Why Was Kennedy Killed? by Michael J. Deeb and Robert Lockwood Mills

If there was ever a week where we had enough Kennedy, it was this one. With the son of a former presidential hopeful and the nephew of one of America’s best-loved presidents of all time making headlines for forging deals with political devils, it’s easy to say, “enough already” with the Kennedy’s. Yet, for all their faults, Michael J. Deeb and Robert Lockwood Mills can’t be called on the carpet for the timing of their new novel, Investigating the Kennedy Assassination: Why Was Kennedy Killed? even though, from first blush, this is a topic that seems as tired as can be.

The book mostly reads like biography. But it’s a fioctional account because, of course, some of the conclusions are made up. Readers meet all of the likely conspirators, one by one. As we’ve heard (again and again and …) the Warren Commission and the FBI agreed that President John F. Kennedy was killed by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald.

Fifteen years later, the House Committee on Assassinations re-examined the evidence. They announced that he was not killed by a single gunman, but probably murdered as the result of a conspiracy. This House Committee hesitated to speculate on who might have been involved in that conspiracy or why John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

In 1979, Michael Burke and former congressman Harold Ryan were asked to continue that investigation. This historical novel concerns itself with that chunk of time. Co-author Michael J. Deeb was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His undergraduate education was completed at Aquinas College. He earned a Master’s degree from Michigan State University and a Doctorate from Wayne State University. He was an educator for nineteen years, most of which saw him teaching American history.

Robert Lockwood Mills is a self-taught historian who has relied more on personal research than printed sources throughout his life. Mills served on a panel on the Lincoln assassination at Ford’s Theater in 1998. He has made numerous radio and cable television appearances since the 1980s, speaking on the Lincoln assassination and the Lizzie Borden case.