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Man of Steel (Cold Cases Book 1) Kindle Edition
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As Jonas and Reno circle closer to the plot they come to realize that the protectors of the secrets are still on the job and they don’t take prisoners. The bodies pile up while the reporters look over their shoulders wondering if the story of the century is worth their lives.
"Very intriguing twist on the JFK assassination story! Was there really a plot behind the assassination, and not just a single shooter? The author has clearly read the findings of the Warren Report -- and the footnotes, which include some strange and interesting facts!" -- Smashwords review
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateApril 2, 2008
- File size669 KB
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From the Author
daveconifer.weebly.com
Product details
- ASIN : B0017DPWO8
- Publication date : April 2, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 669 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 294 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,735,893 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #9,943 in True Crime Biographies
- #26,839 in True Crime (Books)
- #39,082 in Suspense (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Book 4 of the Super Pulse series, "Defect," can now be pre-ordered. Release date is January 10, 2019.
Please visit Dave's web site and sign up for for email updates on future releases.
daveconifer.weebly.com
Dave Conifer is a fitness fanatic living in South Jersey with his wife and three kids. When he's not coaching wrestling or soccer or working as a scout leader, Dave likes to read non-fiction history. He also blogs about the 48 solar panels on his roof and how they generate all the power needed by his family of five.
Three years ago he and his family opened a Polish Water Ice shop on the Atlantic City Boardwalk. If you're there, stop on by.
Dave loves to hear from his readers. He can be found at daveconiferfanpage on Facebook. Send an email to daveconifer@rocketmail.com to be added to the mailing list and find out when something new is coming, or just to say hi.
Or visit Dave's official web site to sign up for emailed updates about new releases.
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"Man of Steel" is not about Superman but about the steel industry, or, more specifically, the CEO of one major steel company who, according to Conifer's book, nursed a grudge against John F. Kennedy for almost 20 years before arranging for the Dallas assassination. The novel is set in the early 1980s, a time when many of the participants in the events surrounding the assassination were still alive. When the son of a former Dallas policeman claims his late father may have been the actual assassin, most newspapers ignore the man's claims, but Charlotte reporter Joe Jonas and Austin reporter Abbe Reno decide to follow up on it.
As Jonas and Reno investigate, they learn that there is much more to the story, albeit not what the original whistleblower was claiming. Instead, it appears that the CEO of a major steel corporation (hence the title) orchestrated the entire conspiracy, part of which involved placing poorly trained rookie recruit police officers on duty when Jack Ruby entered Dallas police headquarters to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. These recruits let Ruby in, and the rest was history. One of the former recruits, now a middle-aged executive at the steel company, starts to tell Joe and Abbe what he knows, but the company's henchmen arrange his death in an "accident" and then go after Joe and Abbe themselves. Joe and Abbe spend the last half of the book pretty much on the run, trying to stay alive while getting enough evidence to justify printing the story.
As JFK conspiracy theories go, the one Conifer hypothesizes isn't all that bad, and he does have some evidence in the Warren Commission findings to justify it (which Abbe is able to dig up and explain to Joe and the readers). Books like "Man of Steel" require a suspension of disbelief, and I was more than willing to do so. Unfortunately, the rest of the novel proved just too incredible for me to accept. I can buy that the CEO of a major company orchestrated the assassination, but the motive Conifer supplies is weak, and I can't see the CEO of a public company in the 1960s being able to divert the vast amount of money and corporate manpower needed for such an effort without being detected. Further, I can't see him keeping a "hit squad" handy for 20 years on the company payroll, bribing, threatening, or killing off anyone who gets too close to the truth. Even 20 years later, the company is able to send more than a dozen agents, many of them cold blooded killers, into the field where they follow Joe and Abbe around. The most surprising feat these agents pull off is setting up a fake detour on a fairly well traveled road that diverts precisely one car, the one driven by the man they want to kill, and later running him off the side of a cliff (I'm not sure how many cliffs they have in Pittsburgh). Amazingly all this preparation and coordination (before the days of computers and cell phones) occurs during the victim's fairly short commute from his suburban home to work.
Another weakness of "Man of Steel" is its character development, or lack thereof. The main characters, Joe and Abbe, are not all that interesting. After spending 300 or so pages with them, all I learned was that they were young and seemingly had endless amounts of time to devote to this one story. There's virtually no character development and the "investigation" they do mostly consists of carefully reading the Warren Commission findings. Although Joe and Abbe, specifically Abbe, may have read these findings carefully, "Man of Steel" doesn't have the feel of having been written by someone who's thoroughly familiarized himself with the underlying story. While I believe Conifer has the factual basis he claims for his theory, the discussion in the book focuses narrowly, far too narrowly, on one of the less interesting aspects of the case... the possibly bogus police officers who let Jack Ruby get to Lee Harvey Oswald. I was a bit disappointed that the entire book revolved around that obscure point (I was expecting an "X Files" style massive detailing of everything suspicious surrounding the assassination. It seemed to me that Conifer's research may only have uncovered the rather sparse material he details in the book.
I'm giving "Man of Steel" a marginal recommendation and one that is based solely on the strength of its underlying subject matter. Conifer has gotten as little dramatic mileage as possible out of his premise. He's created a rather lackluster pair of main characters and added some routine action sequences while concocting a plot and a set of villains that are too outlandish to believe, even for the most ardent conspiracy theorist. Beyond the conspiracy itself, "Man of Steel" often reads more like "Man of Tissue Paper" instead.
Joanas and Reno, two reporters from two different newspapers meet at a press conference which was a total washout. What follows is like chasing a crooked shadow (apologies to the movie Chase a crooked shadow directed by Michael Anderson, staring Richard Todd, Anne Baxter, etc.).
Reno is the hard working, scholarly and research oriented of the two. Their visit to a person mentioned to them leads to his "enacted accidental death". This starts the reporters to suspect foul play and cover up and they themselves become the target for whoever was behind the cover up.
I don't know how good reporters these two characters were, but Dave Conifer is indeed a most imaginative writer. He has spun a great novel using the Warren Commission report and to make an interesting one after hundreds of theories have already been widely discussed shows his creativity. The writing is fast paced, gripping and believable.
The ending is simply too good and shows that Dave Conifer knows his craft very well.
The two main characters are reporters who are looking for a good story but soon find themselves in way over their heads. I'd like to write more about what they uncover while working on their story and the dangers they encounter while doing so, but I don't want to give away any major plot points. Part of the fun of reading a book like this is discovering things as you turn the pages and I don't want to spoil anyone else's fun.
I'll just say this: There's enough good suspense and action in this novel that I kept turning the pages and had a hard time putting my Kindle down until I got to the last page. It's a very compelling story and the author did a great job with it.
This was the first book I read by author Dave Conifer. After reading it, I definitely want to read more by him.
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I liked what the author did with his ideas and I especially liked Reno. Jonas I felt like shaking !! For a reporter he really wasn't a great sleuth though he did get his arse in gear as the story progressed so managed to redeem himself in my eyes.
I see a sequel has been released last month and it's on my wishlist for sure. Now, this would have merited 5 stars were it not for the errors in it. They let it down, sadly, although the author DID use pore properly which is to be lauded.
There were some missing apostrophes and also a lot of omitted words in sentences like and/an or this.
Exasperation was misspelled as exasparation and wide used instead of side, allowed instead of aloud, busses when it needed to be buses. Then dying not dyeing and site instead of sight and most annoyingly Amagiri morphed into Yamagachi as the book went on.
I liked the cover-I have a Kennedy half dollar coin a friend sent me the same.



