Books in John%20Hay%20Mystery series

The Murder of Willie Lincoln is an exciting historical fiction debut by award-winning journalist Burt Solomon.Washington City, 1862: The United States lies in tatters, and the Civil War seems without end, despite Abraham Lincoln’s determination to keep his beloved country united. Lincoln’s soul is tested when tragedy strikes the White House: Willie, Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son, the shining light in the president’s life, dies―of typhoid fever, the doctors say.Then a message arrives, suggesting that murder, not illness, caused Willie’s death. Lincoln asks John Hay, his trusted aide, to investigate. Hay, a boxer and a poet, is an adventurous, irreverent, skeptical, even cynical young man who is as close to Lincoln as a son.The more Hay unearths, the more daunting his task seems. Suspicions of a secessionist conspiracy within the Executive Mansion itself. A threat to Lincoln’s surviving sons. An extortion attempt against the president’s hellcat of a wife. As the war rages on, John Hay chases the truth of Willie’s murder through the loftiest and lowest corners of Washington City.As he closes in, he discovers just how far Lincoln’s enemies will go to keep him silent.

The Murder of Willie Lincoln is an exciting historical fiction debut by award-winning political journalist Burt Solomon.Washington City, 1862: The United States lies in tatters, and there seems no end to the war. Abraham Lincoln, the legitimate President of the United States, is using all his will to keep his beloved land together. But Lincoln’s will and soul are tested when tragedy strikes the White House as Willie Lincoln, the love and shining light in the president’s heart, is taken by typhoid fever.But was this really the cause of his death? A message arrives, suggesting otherwise. Lincoln asks John Hay, his trusted aide―and almost a son―to investigate Willie’s death. Some see Hay as a gadfly--adventurous, incisive, lusty, reflective, skeptical, even cynical―but he loves the president and so seeks the truth behind the boy’s death. And so, as we follow Hay in his investigation, we are shown the loftiest and lowest corners of Washington City, from the president’s office and the gentleman’s dining room at Willard’s Hotel to the alley hovels, wartime hospitals, and the dome-less Capitol’s vermin-infested subbasement. We see the unfamiliar sides of a grief-stricken president, his hellcat of a wife, and their two surviving and suffering sons, and Hay matches wits with such luminaries as General McClellan, William Seward, and the indomitable detective Allan Pinkerton.What Hay discovers has the potential of not only destroying Lincoln, but a nation.