At about 2:15 on the afternoon of July 30, 1975, Jimmy Hoffa telephoned his wife from a pay phone behind a restaurant in suburban Detroit. The men he had come to meet were late. He would be home by four.

He was never seen again.

Home by Four follows the former Teamsters president through the last ninety minutes anyone can prove: the note taped to his lampshade, the five-minute stop at a limousine garage in Pontiac, the forty-five minutes he spent waiting in a crowded parking lot in plain view of six witnesses. Then the clock runs past zero, to a green Pontiac left overnight, a borrowed maroon Mercury, three scent dogs, a single hair, and a grand jury where twenty-two witnesses refused to answer.

Working from the FBI's own 1976 case memorandum, the reporting of the day and fifty years of searches, this book tests every account against the same evidence: the foster son who drove the borrowed car, the mobster nobody could find that afternoon, the friend who confessed before he died, the landfill, the incinerator, the stadium. Each is weighed and given a verdict.

What remains is the most plausible reading of an American mystery, and a plain account of what the record still cannot say.