Jody A. reviewed on 6/27/2007 + 179 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

Grave robbing and witches provide the atmospheric overture as Maj. Abel Jones, agent for Abraham Lincoln, investigates the murder of a Northern general in his fifth suspenseful adventure. In the preceding novel, Honor's Kingdom, the diminutive Welshman was in England working for the Union's interests, but here he returns home to "dear Pottsville" in Pennsylvania. Jones must journey deeper into coal country when Gen. Carl Stone, who had been recruiting Irish miners for the Union army, is found slain. The confessed killer has died of cholera, but a cautionary check of his grave finds interred instead the body of a young woman who has been stabbed to death. The intrigue thus triggered brings Jones up against a mad priest, local witch women and the tight-knit society of the Irish mining community (among its members is Black Jack Kehoe, later notorious in the Molly Maguires). Complicating the investigation are clues pointing to Russia and schemes for world revolution from the prewar years when the general went by the name of Carl von Steinbrock. Inevitably the investigation returns to the Irish immigrants, "Those famine lads cut loose to find their keep, in a world that did not want them or their kind."

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