Blue and the Grey, The (A Grand Batchelor Victorian mystery, 1)

Introducing 19th-century private investigators Matthew Grand and James Batchelor in the first of a brand-new historical mystery series.April, 1865. Having been an eye witness to the assassination of President Lincoln, Matthew Grand, a former captain of the 3rd Cavalry of the Potomac, has come to London on an undercover assignment to hunt down the last of the assassin’s co-conspirators. Ambitious young journalist Jim Batchelor has been charged with writing a feature article on the visiting American, with the aim of getting the inside story on the assassination.Both men are distracted from their missions by the discovery of a body behind the Haymarket Theatre in London’s Soho district. It’s the latest in a series of grisly garrottings by a killer known as the Haymarket Strangler.As Grand and Batchelor team up to pursue their investigations through the dark underbelly of Victorian London, it becomes clear that there may be a disturbing connection between the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the Haymarket Strangler.