The Lost Cause - Lincoln Assassination

Book 1 in the Lincoln Assassination Series

One shot shattered a nation. The next fourteen days would test its soul.

Good Friday, April 14, 1865: a gun cracks inside Ford's Theatre and plunges Washington into chaos. As the President fights for life, a charming actor vanishes into the night—and a frightened capital turns into a hunting ground. Telegraph lines hum. Cavalry boots thunder. Whispers of safe houses, river crossings, and secret sympathizers spread like wildfire.

The Lost Cause hurls you into the manhunt that gripped America—through alleys and taverns, across marsh and midnight ferry, into farmhouses where a single knock could ruin a family forever. Every chapter tightens the net: coded notes, wrong turns, near misses, and a final, firelit standoff that will brand itself on history.

But the story doesn't end with smoke in a tobacco barn. In packed courtrooms, the conspirators face the relentless machinery of military justice. Testimony clashes with rumor. Oaths are weighed against fear. And on a blistering July afternoon, the gallows rise—taking with them answers the nation still craves.

Told with relentless momentum and the sharp detail of lived experience, The Lost Cause delivers the assassination, the two-week chase, the trial, the gallows—and the uneasy question beating beneath it all: how do you find truth when the witnesses are terrified, the papers are hungry, and the country itself is bleeding?

If you love historical thrillers with crackling tension, moral stakes, and unforgettable atmosphere, start here. The hunt has begun.