The Blue and the Grey

February 15, 2015
The Civil War has ended, but the country's optimism is short-lived, cut short when Lincoln is assassinated by actor John Wilkes Booth. Present at Ford's Theater that fateful evening is military officer Matthew Grand, who pursues Booth as he flees the crime scene. Booth escapes, but Grand encounters a mysterious man in the alley behind the theater and assumes he is Booth's accomplice. He loses the man in the dark streets but soon learns that he may have escaped to London. While Booth is shot dead, and his coconspirators are sentenced to hang, Grand travels to London to track down the mystery man. There he meets ambitious young journalist James Batchelor, who is determined to find the vicious killer who's strangling young prostitutes in London's Haymarket. Working on what at first seem like two very different cases, Grand and Batchelor soon realize that Booth's mysterious accomplice and the murderer dubbed the Haymarket Strangler may, in fact, be one and the same. Solid writing, an imaginative plot, authentic period detail, and two intriguing main characters make this first installment in Trow's latest historical mystery series an entertaining and unusual read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)