"My country's made me it's enemy. It's formal, now." —Nat Cinder

With an FBI sting on his misfit secessionist group closing in, Nat Cinder blasts from Flagstaff to Phoenix on his Triumph Rocket motorcycle. Soon he stumbles onto a packet of photos showing Governor Virginia Rentier lustily paired with three high-ranking women in state government.

Though Cinder and the Governor clashed sixteen years before when his wife died in a car accident, Cinder prefers to keep his dislike of Rentier focused on her politics. He's too busy blaming himself for his wife's death, fighting his way back into his son's life, and leading a crew of beer guzzling rebels to become involved in an intrigue about the Governor's sex partners.

But when the bullets fly, Nat asks questions, and learns his sudden war with the Governor traces back sixteen years. The photos were put in his path by a provocateur who knows Nat Cinder's a rough-hewn rebel with enough weaponry cached across Arizona to start a revolution, and the secret at the bottom of his wife's death will turn him into a powder keg.