Young Broadbrim on a False Scent

A boy detective who sees what seasoned men miss. A headless body with no name. And a killer who has already vanished into the dark.

Harry Wilson — known to the city's underworld as Young Broadbrim — has learned one thing from his Quaker mentor: the smallest detail hides the deepest secret. When a headless corpse surfaces in the Harlem River, shot through the heart before the blade even fell, Harry feels it in his bones. This is no ordinary murder.

The dead man's hands tell Harry the truth the police refuse to see. A pianist. A gentleman fallen into obscurity. A man who walked willingly to his own execution.

As Harry pieces together the dead man's shattered past — a tin box delivered to a grief-stricken café keeper, a message written in blood-red ink, a Mexican knife still wet with evidence — the trail twists south toward the border. Toward a shadow figure bearing almost the same name as the victim. Toward a conspiracy older and colder than anything Harry has faced before.

But Harry suspects the clues are almost too perfect. Someone has laid this trail deliberately. Someone who knows exactly how a clever detective thinks.

Now Harry faces the oldest trap in the game: a scent so compelling it could lead him straight into the killer's hands.

Can he trust his instincts when everything he finds is exactly what he was meant to find?