Central Kansas Library System

In 1908, a brilliant American battleship gun designer dies in a sensational apparent suicide. The man's grief-stricken daughter turns to the legendary Van Dorn Detective Agency to clear her father's name. Van Dorn puts his chief investigator on the case, and Isaac Bell soon realizes that the clues point not to suicide but to murder.

It is 1906, and in New York City, the Italian crime group known as the Black Hand (La Mano Nera) is on a spree: kidnapping, extortion, arson. Detective Isaac Bell of the Van Dorn Agency is hired to form a special "Black Hand squad," but the gangsters appear to be everywhere -- so much so that Bell begins to wonder if there are imitators, criminals using the name for the terror effect. And then the murders begin, each one of a man more powerful than...

"Isaac Bell thwarts the assassination of a U.S. Senator shortly after meeting the man. But this heroic rescue is just the start of the mystery for Bell, who suspects that the would-be assassins have a much larger and more dangerous agenda--one involving the nearly-constructed Panama Canal. While the senator supports the building of the canal, there are many who never want to see its completion. With millions of dollars and the fates of two nations...