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 1902, and a bright, inexperienced young man named Isaac Bell, only two years out of his apprenticeship at the Van Dorn Detective Agency, has an urgent message for his boss. Hired to hunt for radical unionist saboteurs in the coal mines, he is witness to a terrible accident that makes him think something else is going on ...that provocateurs are at work and bigger stakes are in play.....fly leaf.

As Van Dorn private detective Isaac Bell strives to land a government contract to investigate John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly, the case takes a deadly turn. A sniper begins murdering opponents of Standard Oil, and soon the assassin -- shooting with extraordinary accuracy at seemingly impossible long range -- kills Bell's best witness, a brave and likable man. Then the shooter detonates a terrible explosion that sets the victim's independent...

"The year is 1911. Chief Investigator Isaac Bell of the Van Dorn Detective Agency has had many extraordinary cases before. But none quite like this. Hired to find a young woman named Anna Pape who ran away from home to become an actress, Bell gets a shock when her murdered body turns up instead. Vowing to bring the killer to justice, he begins a manhunt which leads him into increasingly more alarming territory...Anna Pape was not alone in her fate--petite...

"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...