The Black Hills
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Private detectives Grand & Batchelor embark for the Wild West - and headlong into a baffling murder investigation in this gripping Victorian mystery.
March, 1875. Although he has never had much time for George Custer, hero of the American Civil War and Commander of the 7th Cavalry, Matthew Grand feels duty bound to respond to a call for help from his West Point contemporary. Arriving at Fort Abraham Lincoln, deep in Dakota territory, private enquiry agents Grand and Batchelor discover the fort to be a powder keg of rumour and suspicion, petty rivalries, resentments - and closely-guarded secrets.
When a body is discovered during a routine scouting patrol, some of those secrets rise uncomfortably close to the surface. Are the Lakota Sioux responsible? Or does the killer lie closer to home? Could it have been a case of mistaken identity - and was Custer himself the real target? The General has made many enemies - but does someone have a good enough reason to kill him?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Trow's lightweight sixth Grand and Batchelor Victorian mystery (after 2018's The Ring) takes English enquiry agents Matthew Grand and James Batchelor to Washington, D.C., where Civil War hero George Custer, now the commander of Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Dakota Territory, hires them to watch his back as he testifies before a committee in the 1870s regarding a corruption scandal involving the secretary of war. When a senator walking with Custer is killed by a runaway cab, the two detectives deduce that the intended victim was Custer. Grand and Batchelor later return with Custer to Fort Lincoln, where they gossip with the ladies at tea and take part in evening singalongs, until a soldier is shot while riding Custer's favorite horse. Trow skillfully mines the rich vein of controversy that surrounds Custer, though the unflattering portrait of Ulysses S. Grant ("the most corrupt president we've had since Martin van Buren," according to one character) will strike some readers as an inaccurate caricature of the 18th president. Those who don't mind cardboard characters with often peculiar motives will have fun.
