William Monk Series #11
Random House
October 2001
Featuring: Daniel Alberton; Hester Monk; William Monk
368 pages ISBN: 0449005925 Paperback (reprint) Add to Wish List
Monk walked across, his stomach cold, his legs shaking. There were two bodies lying close to each other, a third a little distance away, perhaps nine or ten feet. They were all in strangely contorted positions, as if they had been on the ground when someone had passed a broom handle under their knees and over their arms. Their hands and ankles were tied, preventing them from moving, and they were gagged. The first two were strangers.
Monk walked over to the third, his stomach sick. It was Donald Alberton. He, like the others, had been shot through the head.
A quiet dinner party in London seems a long way from the ugly skirmishes across the Atlantic that will soon explode into the American Civil War. But, when William Monk and his wife, Hester, are invited to dine with Daniel Albertonโs family and agree to investigate a case of blackmail overshadowing their hostโs life, they are suddenly drawn into Americaโs violent and bloody dispute.
Alberton, a London weapons trader, had promised to sell arms to the South but faces a moral dilemma when his daughter Merrit, in love with a Union officer and ardently opposed to slavery, insists he change sides. When he refuses, she disappears from their home. That night, Alberton is brutally murdered, his supply of weapons is stolen, and a watch belonging to Merritโs lover is found beside his corpse. The American, Lyman Breeland, is the immediate suspect.
Albertonโs widow begs William and Hester to follow her daughter to America and persuade her to come home. But to do so they must risk the danger involved in bringing the pair back from the front line and forcing Breeland to face justice in an English court.
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