The Lincoln Conspiracy

July 16, 2012
Huffington Post editor O’Brien (Bad Bet) fails to make the most of a promising premise in his fiction debut, a thriller set in the spring of 1865. When Washington, D.C., police detective Temple McFadden retrieves a package carried by a courier he knows shortly after the man’s throat is cut at the B&O train station, McFadden is stunned to discover that it contains two diaries—one written by the just widowed Mary Todd Lincoln, and the other the apparent work of John Wilkes Booth himself. A cursory reading of both suggests that there was more to the plot to murder the president than the official account would have the public believe. The policeman finds himself caught between powerful competing forces, each with their own reasons for getting access to the documents. O’Brien offers an intriguing theory for the motive behind the assassination, but readers will find more suspense in George O’Toole’s similarly themed The Cosgrove Report. Agent: Andrew Blauner, Blauner Books Literary.

September 15, 2012
Huffington Post national editor O'Brien (TrumpNation, 2005) ventures into fiction in this historical thriller, featuring an 1865 detective digging into the murder of Abraham Lincoln. Metropolitan Police Inspector Temple McFadden sees a messenger get his throat slit at the B&O Railroad station in Washington, D.C. Temple takes a package containing a journal and a diary from the man's corpse. It turns out that these are no ordinary finds: One is the diary of Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the recently slain president, while the other was written by Lincoln's murderer, John Wilkes Booth, and includes mysterious coded messages. McFadden immediately finds himself targeted by dangerous men who are after the package, and he enlists the help of several friends in an investigation that reveals an undiscovered plot behind Lincoln's assassination. O'Brien's fiction debut joins other recent Lincoln-related historical novels, such as Stephen L. Carter's alternate-history tale The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln and William Martin's The Lincoln Letter, a somewhat similar mystery that revolves around a lost Lincoln diary. O'Brien has delivered a serviceable thriller, even if he often leans a bit too heavily on brutal violence to shake things up. He has clearly put in a fair amount of research here, and he revels in the historical details he scatters liberally throughout the narrative; indeed, he occasionally drifts into history-lecture territory. That said, O'Brien does make clever use of real-life historical figures throughout, including such notables as Mrs. Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, private detective Allan Pinkerton, photographer Alexander Gardner and journalist Noah Brooks, among many others. A fair historical mystery that will most interest dedicated fans of Lincolniana.

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April 1, 2012

We know why Lincoln was assassinated, right? Wrong, says O'Brien, national editor of the Huffington Post, who has teased a theory out of the historical record and turned it into a thriller. When a friend is slain at the B&O railroad station, Det. Temple McFadden finds two diaries in his pocket: one belonging to Mary Todd Lincoln and one to John Wilkes Booth.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2012
O'Brien, national editor at The Huffington Post, delivers a first novel that unveils a historical puzzle as labyrinthine and grandiose as Scheherazade's tales. President Lincoln is dead, and Booth has escaped. But was the assassination of the man who freed the slaves part of a larger, more insidious conspiracy? While going about his business at the railway station, police detective Temple McFadden witnesses a murder, steals the corpse's carryall, gets in a fight, and rides away wounded on a purloined horse, followed by unknown assailants. Two diaries from the carryall, belonging to Mrs. Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth, are the objects of interest to all concerned, but by the time McFadden is caught, he no longer has the package. So begins our introduction to a maze of characters, events, and motives that threatens to leave us completely unmoored. How can a wounded, cane-walking, poetry-quoting Irish detective find a killer, return a diary, best the bullies, protect his wife, and unmask the culprits behind the conspiracy? As clever as Sherlock Holmes, as wily as Pendergast in Preston and Child's series, and wickedly funny on top of it all, the irrresistible McFadden is due to return in a sequelthank goodness!(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)