Angel in the Fog

February 18, 2019
Turner’s uneven third historical (after 2017’s Land of Wolves), a prequel, opens with a harrowing scene set in New Orleans in May 1860. Molly Ferguson, the love interest of Joseph Foster, who stopped John Wilkes Booth from assassinating Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in 2015’s Lincoln’s Bodyguard, witnesses a lynch mob hang her father, the owner of a plantation that was profitable without slaves, and burn down the family house. Flash forward to February 1861; Molly is a prisoner in a Baltimore brothel, where her perspicacity brings her to the attention of a Pinkerton operative and, ultimately, Allan Pinkerton himself. She’s rescued from her life as a prostitute and enlisted to help foil a plan by Southern sympathizers to assassinate Lincoln when his train passes through Baltimore en route to Washington, D.C., for his inauguration. Too many plot contrivances, including a melodramatic late reveal, make this less enjoyable than its predecessors. Agent: Elizabeth Kracht, Kimberley Cameron & Assoc.

April 15, 2019
Molly Ferguson was working in a Baltimore brothel?and hating it?when she was recruited to help protect the president-elect, Abraham Lincoln, from secessionist assassins. She had repeated a client's murderous plan to a stranger, who happened to be linked to Alan Pinkerton's agency, and, in a blink, she's being prepped for undercover work by the great detective. Author Turner has crammed his narrative with fascinating historical bits, but he's out to do a spy thriller, and the heroine's sessions with Pinkerton do recall Bond's browbeating by M. The tension ramps up after Lincoln is safe (this time, at least), and Molly?after being tutored by Mrs. Kate Warne, a real-life character who was America's first female private investigator?must enter high society in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, and ferret out the war plans of the Confederacy's high command. Turner's feminist spin on nineteenth-century sleuthing works effectively in this latest in his Lincoln's Bodyguard series (following Land of Wolves, 2017). For another look at espionage during the Civil War, try Dara Horn's All Other Nights (2009).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)