A GOLDEN GRAVE

An Irish maid–turned–Pinkerton agent never lets being out of her depth stop her.

Rose Gallagher and her former employer and true love, wealthy Englishman Thomas Wiltshire, are working for Pinkerton’s special branch. Rose is in training, learning to shoot, ride, and defend herself, when they’re called back to New York, where Rose has been helping to find paranormal entities. Rose’s encounter with a ghost (Murder on Millionaires’ Row, 2018) left her with the ability to sense shades, and she’s learned that some people, including Wiltshire and his friend Jonathan Burrows, have varied special powers called "lucks." Sgt. Chapman, one of the few honest police officers in 1886 New York, tells Rose about the deaths of six delegates to the Republican Convention from unknown causes that the chief of detectives, who’s in thrall to Tammany Hall, is passing off as a rare form of typhoid. The case is far above Chapman’s pay grade but perfect for the Pinkertons. Since Burrows’ luck is the ability to tell where an object has been by touching it, Rose sends him to the morgue in hopes that he can sniff out a clue. The six delegates were all backing mayoral candidate Theodore Roosevelt. Is TR now in danger himself? Although the case has been hushed up, a coroner on the Pinkerton payroll thinks the cause of death is cardiac failure, suggesting a shade whose very touch can cause death. Rose and Wiltshire continue to hunt for the killer as she gingerly mingles with ultrasnobbish New York socialites and meets brilliant inventor Nikola Tesla, whose ideas lead them to seek not a shade but a man whose luck is the ability to kill with a touch.

A rousing paranormal adventure that explores the vast class differences shaping the heroine's romance, with real historical personages adding a fillip.