Rogues in a Nation

A SWEEPING, MULTI-GENERATIONAL AMERICAN STORY WHERE BURIED POLITICAL SECRETS, FAMILY HISTORIES, AND THE GHOSTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY COLLIDE. When Valerie Lisowski, a veteran psychiatric nurse, returns home to Appleton during a turbulent political moment, she expects a quiet visit with her aging parents. Instead, an unexpected guest arrives with a revelation that shatters everything she thought she knew about her family--and her country. Decades earlier, her father Herb came of age in the chaotic aftermath of World War II, juggling his love of film, the burdens of service, and a fateful friendship with a displaced Soviet laborer. But it was his entanglement with powerful industrialists and an ambitious Wisconsin politician that set in motion a series of consequences reaching far beyond the Midwest. As Valerie listens to the story her parents never told, a hidden past emerges--one shaped by propaganda, political machinations, Cold War paranoia, and the dangerous ease with which ordinary people can become complicit in extraordinary wrongdoing. Moving between postwar Germany, mid-century Wisconsin, and the present-day labor protests unfolding at the Capitol, Rogues in a Nation intertwines personal memory with national history to explore how private choices echo across generations. Powerful, cinematic, and deeply human, this novel asks: What do we owe to the truth--and to each other--when the past refuses to stay buried?