By Paul Carrier
For someone who relies on a cane because he has a bum leg, likable tough guy Temple McFadden is one very active cop. Too bad he’s the protagonist in such a badly flawed novel.
A detective with the Metropolitan Police in Washington, D.C., McFadden witnesses a murder at a train station a few weeks after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, retrieves two diaries from the corpse that may identify additional conspirators, steals a horse, and narrowly escapes being shot at point-blank range.
He is then bloodied with a riding crop, gets his horse shot out from under him, knocks a swordsman to the ground, hands off the diaries to a friend, gets shot in the shoulder by one of several heavily armed men who are pursuing him on horseback, and collapses as two gun-wielding bands do battle to get their hands on the diaries.
And that’s all in the first 19 pages of The Lincoln Conspiracy.
Author Timothy O’Brien maintains that brisk pace for more than 300 pages before finally introducing (spoiler alert) the man who hired John Wilkes Booth to kill Lincoln. Except that O’Brien does not actually reveal the man’s identity. This elusive figure, referred to throughout the novel by the code name “Maestro,” turns out to be an obscenely wealthy but unnamed railroad baron.
If O’Brien thought that maintaining this air of mystery right through to the bitter end would somehow satisfy the reader, he was sadly mistaken, at least in my case. Perhaps “Maestro” will resurface in a sequel and come into better focus at that time, but that doesn’t ease the annoyance. To describe this turn of events as anticlimactic is an understatement.
O’Brien peoples his tale with a mix of real-life historical figures and fictional characters. They propel the plot at a good clip, as McFadden, his physician wife Fiona and their African-American friend Augustus work to decipher the diaries’ clues while eluding the dueling gunmen who will stop at nothing to snatch the journals.
A grieving Mary Todd Lincoln makes an appearance in these pages. So does her confidante and dressmaker, former slave Elizabeth Keckly. Detective and spy Allan Pinkerton is on hand, as well as U.S. Army spymaster Lafayette Baker, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner, and abolitionist and activist Sojourner Truth. Even George Armstrong Custer has a walk-on part.
The Lincoln Conspiracy is blessed with a fine sense of time and place. The period and the setting are well-researched, and interesting historical details grace the novel’s pages. The dialogue is just dated enough to provide a 19th-century flair without being obtuse. O’Brien sprinkles his tale with appropriately archaic or specialized terminology, such as “rounder” (a dissolute person), “modiste” (a dressmaker), “boodler” (a political grafter) and “barouche” (a type of carriage).
But in the end, it’s all for naught.
In addition to being stunned by the novel’s far from satisfying denouement, I have a quibble. It pales by comparison to the glaring letdown of The Lincoln Conspiracy’s maddening conclusion, but here it is anyway.
The author flaunts his knowledge of the streets and byways of 19th-century Washington a bit too freely, with overly detailed descriptions of the routes that our hero takes during his escapes and escapades in the city. At times, the reader feels as if someone has traveled back to the 19th century to hand McFadden a GPS system, and we are forced to watch him play with it.
The real victim of this conspiracy is not so much Abraham Lincoln as the reader who makes the mistake of cracking open this book. Despite its sporadic virtues, The Lincoln Conspiracy disappoints.
A detective with the Metropolitan Police in Washington, D.C., McFadden witnesses a murder at a train station a few weeks after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, retrieves two diaries from the corpse that may identify additional conspirators, steals a horse, and narrowly escapes being shot at point-blank range.
He is then bloodied with a riding crop, gets his horse shot out from under him, knocks a swordsman to the ground, hands off the diaries to a friend, gets shot in the shoulder by one of several heavily armed men who are pursuing him on horseback, and collapses as two gun-wielding bands do battle to get their hands on the diaries.
And that’s all in the first 19 pages of The Lincoln Conspiracy.
Author Timothy O’Brien maintains that brisk pace for more than 300 pages before finally introducing (spoiler alert) the man who hired John Wilkes Booth to kill Lincoln. Except that O’Brien does not actually reveal the man’s identity. This elusive figure, referred to throughout the novel by the code name “Maestro,” turns out to be an obscenely wealthy but unnamed railroad baron.
If O’Brien thought that maintaining this air of mystery right through to the bitter end would somehow satisfy the reader, he was sadly mistaken, at least in my case. Perhaps “Maestro” will resurface in a sequel and come into better focus at that time, but that doesn’t ease the annoyance. To describe this turn of events as anticlimactic is an understatement.
O’Brien peoples his tale with a mix of real-life historical figures and fictional characters. They propel the plot at a good clip, as McFadden, his physician wife Fiona and their African-American friend Augustus work to decipher the diaries’ clues while eluding the dueling gunmen who will stop at nothing to snatch the journals.
A grieving Mary Todd Lincoln makes an appearance in these pages. So does her confidante and dressmaker, former slave Elizabeth Keckly. Detective and spy Allan Pinkerton is on hand, as well as U.S. Army spymaster Lafayette Baker, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner, and abolitionist and activist Sojourner Truth. Even George Armstrong Custer has a walk-on part.
The Lincoln Conspiracy is blessed with a fine sense of time and place. The period and the setting are well-researched, and interesting historical details grace the novel’s pages. The dialogue is just dated enough to provide a 19th-century flair without being obtuse. O’Brien sprinkles his tale with appropriately archaic or specialized terminology, such as “rounder” (a dissolute person), “modiste” (a dressmaker), “boodler” (a political grafter) and “barouche” (a type of carriage).
But in the end, it’s all for naught.
In addition to being stunned by the novel’s far from satisfying denouement, I have a quibble. It pales by comparison to the glaring letdown of The Lincoln Conspiracy’s maddening conclusion, but here it is anyway.
The author flaunts his knowledge of the streets and byways of 19th-century Washington a bit too freely, with overly detailed descriptions of the routes that our hero takes during his escapes and escapades in the city. At times, the reader feels as if someone has traveled back to the 19th century to hand McFadden a GPS system, and we are forced to watch him play with it.
The real victim of this conspiracy is not so much Abraham Lincoln as the reader who makes the mistake of cracking open this book. Despite its sporadic virtues, The Lincoln Conspiracy disappoints.
