On the night before the 2008 Army-Navy Game, a midshipman is found stark naked and barely alive in the lobby of a cheap motel near the Naval Academy. The plebe's closest relatives are Ole and Lena Lindstrom, a pair of aging but still scrappy Wisconsin political activists who want lawyer Rep Pennyworth to help them get copyright protection for an audacious package of campaign ideas that put rich and ruthless gambling interests in the cross-hairs. The political neophyte they have in mind as a candidate heads a think-tank at UWM, where she is exploiting for her own political purposes the sensitive issue of domestic violence.