"The Lincoln Deception" on Audible.com

Audible.com has finally listed the audiobook version of The Lincoln Deception, narrated by L.J. Ganser.  I’m a huge fan of audiobooks, and listen to them all the time in the car, even on very short trips to the market or the gym. Right now I’m near the end of the audio version of Bernard Cornwell’s 1356, a chronicle of…

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Washington Navy Yard: Some Tough History

For someone writing a book about James Madison (that’s me), yesterday’s mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard has powerful echoes.  While the new national capital was being hacked out of forest and swamp in the 1790s, Congress arranged to buy land for a naval support facility.  Soon the navy yard at Washington City was…

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John Bingham: American Founding Son

Today marks the launch of a new biography of Congressman John Bingham of Cadiz, Ohio, American Founding Son, by Gerard Magliocca of University of Indiana School of Law.  It’s great to have this fresh and excellent examination of Bingham, a key force in helping to shape the America that emerged from the Civil War: Bingham…

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Looking for America in World War I

On a recent trip to France, as part of research for a novel I hope to write next year, my long-suffering wife endured several days in northeastern France looking for traces of America’s role in World War I.  The weather was just right for imagining nasty, soggy trench warfare, where half the casualties were from illness,…

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"The Lincoln Deception": One step closer!

I just received a few “advanced reader copies” (i.e., copies for reviewers) of my forthcoming novel, The Lincoln Deception.  It’s a great pleasure to see them, though the book doesn’t go on sale until August 27.  You can reserve a copy by pre-0rder from Amazon. I dedicated this one — a historical mystery that tries to unravel the secrets of the…

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Burr's Corsets . . .

Aaron Burr’s devotion to the charms of the fair sex is the apparent justification for a new exhibition at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Upper Manhattan, where Burr lived for a few months during his short-lived second marriage at age 77.  The show is titled “The Loves of Aaron Burr:  Portraits in Corsetry and Binding.” I did…

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The Lincoln Deception

Well, there it is!  The cover of my first novel, which will be released on August 27.   Sink into the crepuscular gaslight of Washington in 1900 as our mismatched heroes struggle to scrape away the myths, misunderstandings and lies surrounding the John Wilkes Booth Conspiracy, while dodging the powerful secret forces that need to keep the…

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Pirates Ahoy!

I don’t think these pirates look much like Captain Jack Sparrow, though it might be more entertaining if they did. Nah, it wouldn’t. I was blown away by a recent notice from Simon & Schuster, publisher of my three books to date, reporting the number of pirated e-copies of my books that they have bullied off the Internet. What’s…

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Reading Madison's Mail

Bulletins from the frontiers of research: When it came to negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, American diplomats James Monroe and Robert Livingston sewed up the deal in a couple of weeks.  When it came to squabbling over credit, the two diplomats spent eighteen months writing backbiting letters to James Madison (Secretary of State) explaining in excrutiating detail…

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Was King Richard III really all that bad?

After 500 years, we now know where the bones of King Richard III of England are.  They have been found under a parking lot in Leicester, England, near the site of the Battle of Bosworth where he was slain. The evil genius of Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard — hunchbacked, vicious, fiendish clever — was the…

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