Virtue's End

As Matt Carston stands at the adit to Virtue's End, thunder riddled with coarse laughter rolls through the August heat. The muddled stench of urine, stale beer, and strong perfume taunts his nostrils. His heart is heavy. Recalling the sweet innocence of Louisa's youth, he shakes his head, finding it impossible to place his sister amidst the darkness and debauchery of the Lower East Side's most notorious bordello camp. Yet a string of clues has led him from her death to this spot, and now he too must enter. A TASKMASTER'S WHORE NO MORE! The cryptic quote left at the murder scene taunts Matt day and night. The fact that the exclamation point was crafted in Louisa's blood has made it personal. He and his best friend, Peter, forge a pact to find the killer and bring him to justice, even as a resolute Detective Flanagan warns them not to interfere with his investigation. But who was capable of such a heinous act? Was it Louisa's mysterious "gentleman caller", who'd courted her during her stay at the Baxter Street Settlement House and had a tendency to suddenly turn cold? Could it have been Angie D'Abrizzi, Matt's childhood nemesis, who was now Tammany's ward boss in control of, among other shady schemes, the sex trade of Virtue's End? How about Freddie Purvy, the scumbag of a stitching foreman at Murdock's Textile, the factory where Matt's family had worked for years? He'd snatched Louisa's virginity as a vulnerable teen and his reputation as a womanizer had only grown more lurid over the years. But now, through Matt's investigation of the hook-alley and the Lunatic Asylum at Ward's Island, the image of a brute named Boris and nicknamed "the basher" has risen to the top of the list. He wears disguises and preys on prostitutes and had once beaten Louisa to within an inch of her life. His true identity almost surely holds the key to solving a riddle that grows more complex as news surfaces of a second murder, this one in the Washington D.C. theater district, with a modus operandi eerily similar to Louisa's. Peter, who works as a reporter for the Washington Post, uses his ties in the capitol to investigate the second murder and finds that the perpetrator was indeed the same in both cases. While in D.C., he also meets with Cortelyou, Secretary to the President, to discuss his hush-hush exposé on the rising threat of anarchists, both to society in general and the president in particular. The presidential party will be heading for Buffalo shortly, and Peter promises to have the data in Cortelyou's hands upon arrival at Expo. This sets the reporter on a whirlwind train tour of anarchist camps in Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Toledo, unfolding a string of clues that interweave a pair of plots that may or may not reveal the identity of the killer. In the meantime Matt, after fumbling his way through an attempted rekindling with his childhood sweetheart, is thrown in jail for obstruction of justice and nearly put to death by Angie D'Abrizzi and his thugs upon release. In the end, all roads lead to the Pan-American Exposition of 1901, where achievement is in opulent display, where romance abounds, where betrayal rears its ugly head, and where two separate murder plots become evident at a point where only one can be thwarted.