The Americans meets Homecoming in 2025 Austin as the author blends true family history with fiction to tell the story of his daughter and her reporter friend’s investigation into the secret lives of their CIA grandparents and decades of the agency’s illegal domestic activities.

Jenna Gonyea is a young marketing whiz living the good life in Austin, Texas as a supplier of custom AI services to the likes of Dell and Tesla… far removed from anything government.

But her family has a secret. Her grandmother, Helen Gonyea, had been a CIA officer during the cold war. Everyone knew it but it was seldom discussed until… an accidental discovery by her father reveals that both of her grandparents, Helen and Jerry, had been lifelong intelligence agents. And, her grandfather’s accidental death in 1964 might not have been an accident after all.

Inexplicably compelled to expose her grandparent’s true history, Jenna joins forces with an investigative reporter, Paul, whose grandfather was tied to Helen and Jerry through their local Catholic church in Austin. After meeting Paul at the church’s reunion, the two follow a trove of evidence left behind by Helen. Her letters, documents and audio recordings provide a roadmap for the two to follow through many of the familiar CIA Cold War projects but with evidence never before seen.

The pair’s investigation is not driven by duty or revenge but by a shared desire to determine whether their grandparents were good or evil, patriots or traitors, or just reluctant co-conspirators. The one thing they knew for sure was that the CIA’s cold war experiments had never stopped.