Overview

A young man goes to war ordinary and comes back changed. Jimmy Ward survives the worst of the Civil War, but what it leaves in him is colder than steel. Years later, newspapers call him the Petticoat Butcher. The trail he cuts-quiet towns, rail depots, boardinghouses-stretches across Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas. Two men won't let that trail go cold. Pinkerton agents Edward Hart and Teddy Meachman build a case from splinters: a name used twice, a ticket stub, the angle of a knot. Each step draws them deeper into Ward's long drift west and the habits he learned when the army taught boys to do necessary things. A stint behind the walls at Lansing-Kansas State Penitentiary-only hones his patience. Waiting becomes his weapon. And yet, in the brief calm of a borrowed life, Ward falls in love with Elizabeth-a woman who believes in a man she really doesn't know. For a moment the tracks go quiet. Then the bodies start again. Told in lean, relentless prose, The Petticoat Butcher is a historical manhunt through America's reconstruction years-part thriller, part true-crime echo-where the distance between a soldier and a killer is measured in what the war leaves behind and what two determined detectives are willing to spend to stop him. For readers of gritty historical crime, Pinkerton fiction, and suspense with real places under its feet.

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