Old Broadbrim Playing a Desperate Game

A man is dead. His throat cut in the dark. And no one in New York even knows his name.

Old Broadbrim steps off a Chicago train on New Year's morning, tired and hungry, expecting rest. What he finds instead is a crowd, a corpse, and a mystery that reaches back twenty years into the city's buried past.

The dead man wore prison clothes. He spoke of vengeance. He knocked on a door that hadn't opened in two decades—then walked straight into the arms of his killer.

Broadbrim pieces together the truth with the patience of a man who has learned that justice rarely announces itself. The victim, he discovers, was Alfred Lawrence—convicted of forgery, stripped of his fortune, abandoned by his wife, swallowed by Sing Sing—and now silenced before he could name the men who destroyed him.

But someone knew Lawrence was coming. Someone followed him through the midnight streets. Someone knew exactly which window to climb through and which throat to cut.

As Broadbrim traces a conspiracy of perjured testimony, stolen inheritance, and twenty years of calculated silence, the city's shadows grow darker and the danger grows personal. The men who buried Alfred Lawrence once are willing to bury anyone who digs him up.

Can the world's greatest detective expose a conspiracy two decades in the making—before the Red Dragon claims another victim?