SERGEANT VERITY AND THE BLOOD ROYAL

Well-researched Victorian adventure-mystery in the Sergeant Verity of Scotland Yard series--as plain-clothesman Verity goes to North America (sometimes in the company of the Prince of Wales) to foil his eternal antagonist, Lieutenant Verney Dacre, cracksman supreme. In the course of the chase, Verity finds himself in a wheelbarrow being rolled across a tightwire over Niagara Falls by a ropewalker (to the appreciative joy of Prince Edward) while Dacre is hiring a chimney sweep to outline for him the flue system in the Philadelphia mint: he robs the impenetrable treasury of about two million in gold eagles--gold already minted that is worth exactly its own weight and need never be fenced!--by climbing through the tight flues, cracking an uncrackable steel door, and getting the money up the chimney and out. Verity's pursuit of Dacre leads him to St. Louis and at last to West Point, where the two men fight it out on a cable stretched vertiginously across the Hudson. Routine but solid intrigues--with better-than-average period accouterments.