September 15, 2017
The first major task for a jack-of-all-trades assistant to President Abraham Lincoln is to solve a murder with the utmost discretion.Adam Quinn has recently returned from the Bleeding Kansas slavery battles, where he lost an arm. His family is old friends with the Lincolns, and his uncle Joshua Speed asked the president to offer Adam a job. At the 1861 inaugural ball, he works with Allan Pinkerton, who provides the president with security, to look for anything suspicious, as the southern states are already withdrawing from the Union and assassination attempts are likely. At the ball, he notices an underdressed man acting suspiciously and meets Constance Lemagne, a beautiful Southern belle. When the pro-Union banker Custer Billings is found stabbed in a small anteroom, Lincoln asks Adam to find his killer. Billings' coat is missing, and all that is found on his body are a watch, a handkerchief, and a business card belong to Constance's father, Hurst Lemagne, who has no love for Billings. Adam discovers that the man he was watching at the ball is actually a female reporter calling herself Henry Altman, who vanishes before he can question her. With the help of a black doctor willing to risk his life doing an autopsy on a white man, Adam learns that the murder weapon is not the unusual dagger found at the scene but something larger and hard to identify. Adam finds many people who may have wanted Billings dead for private or political reasons. Washington is a city of Southern sympathizers where pigs roam the muddy streets, the president's house is threadbare and completely open to the public, and there is no police department to speak of. The tracking skills Adam learned from a Native American friend will put him on the path to success. Prolific Gleason (Amazon Roulette, 2015, etc.) kicks off a new series with an adequate mystery and more than adequate descriptions of the nation's capital at a critical moment in history.
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October 2, 2017
Set in Washington, D.C., this uneven series launch from Gleason (Siberian Treasure) opens on the day of Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration as president in March 1861. Adam Quinn, who lost an arm protecting the president-elect, is now serving as a sort of jack-of-all-trades on Lincoln’s staff. During the festivities that evening, a man is stabbed to death in a room adjacent to the ballroom in a temporary building erected for the inauguration. Since the president doesn’t want his wife, Mary, disturbed, he asks Adam to investigate quietly. Adam learns that the dead man is a banker, Custer Billings, who was arguing earlier in the evening with Hurst Lemagne, a Southerner, whose fetching daughter, Constance, was Adam’s dance partner at the ball. Gleason does a good job evoking the period with convincing detail, but she fails to make her lead, whose previous investigative experience was as an animal tracker, an impressive sleuth. Other authors have used the Civil War era as the background for a whodunit more effectively. Agent: Maura Kye-Casella, Don Congdon Associates.