"Liberty is fleeting; terrorism is eternal!" Or so discovers Assistant US Attorney and widower John Ferguson while reading an ancient manuscript purporting to be that of Thomas Jefferson's 1784 Paris diary, between handling a perplexing new case and rearing a precocious four-year-old son and bright-but-troubled teenage daughter. But when he discovers that the political protester he's prosecuting for assault on a federal marshal may be linked to a terrorist organization seemingly intent on wreaking havoc in his Jackson, Mississippi, hometown, and a mysterious new love interest suddenly appears on his doorstep, he finds himself locked in a life and death struggle with a brilliant but demented revolutionary dedicated to the destruction of all Ferguson holds dear and nothing less than the eradication of the American way of life.