The Jeremiah Thorne Novels: BOOK 1: The Cypress Cage

The Jeremiah Thorne Novels: BOOK 1: The Cypress Cage In the sweltering, occupied city of New Orleans-a powder keg of Creole resentment and military rule-Allan Pinkerton's best detective, Jeremiah Thorne, arrives with a clandestine mission. He has been summoned by the city's reviled military governor, Major General Benjamin Butler, a man known as "The Beast," to uncover the source of the conspiracies that threaten to boil over into open rebellion. Butler's army is an axe, meant for felling trees, but the city's sickness requires the delicate touch of a surgeon. Thorne, a quiet observer of details who sees the world as a series of locks waiting for the right key, is that surgeon. His investigation begins before he even has time to acclimate to the oppressive Louisiana heat. A Union quartermaster, Captain Robert Ames, is found brutally murdered in a dark alley, strangled with a garrote and pinned with the palmetto rosette of the secessionists . While Butler's brutish provost marshal prepares to hang dozens of innocent citizens to make an example, Thorne's keen eye sees what others miss: this is not a simple political assassination. Teaming up with a weary but brilliant local physician, Dr. Etienne Dubois, Thorne discovers that the murder was a cold, professional execution, designed to cover a far more dangerous secret. The captain was not killed for his uniform, but for what he had discovered: a sophisticated conspiracy of treason and profit, siphoning massive quantities of gunpowder from Union army stores. Thorne's hunt for the truth leads him from the city's squalid back alleys to its most elegant parlors, and directly into the orbit of the conspiracy's untouchable queen: the magnificent and formidable Creole widow, Isabelle de Valcour. A living symbol of the city's unconquered spirit, she presides over a shadowy network of smugglers and disaffected merchants from her Royal Street mansion. Aided by the legendary and ruthless riverboat captain Luke Devereaux, she has turned her patriotic fervor into a lethal enterprise. As another Union officer is murdered to protect the operation, an enraged General Butler gives Thorne an impossible ultimatum: bring him proof of the conspiracy in forty-eight hours, or he will unleash his axe on the city and begin the mass hangings. Forced into a desperate gambit, Thorne and Dr. Dubois must orchestrate a high-stakes sting operation, baiting a trap with a fortune in phantom quinine to lure the conspirators into the open. The violent confrontation that follows provides Thorne with the leverage he needs to penetrate Isabelle's inner circle, only to uncover a final, terrifying plot far more devastating than he could have imagined. In a desperate race against time, Thorne must use all his cunning to stage a masterful counter-trap, risking everything to prevent a catastrophic act of terror designed to destroy a Union warship, immolate the entire wharf district, and plunge New Orleans into a new and horrifying chapter of the Civil War. The Cypress Cage is a tense, atmospheric thriller that plunges the reader into the murky depths of a city at war with itself. It is a story of espionage and shifting loyalties, where the lines between patriot and terrorist, honor and survival, are blurred beyond recognition. It is the story of one man's lonely battle to impose order on a world consumed by chaos, where the price of peace must be paid in blood, betrayal, and a piece of his own soul.