cover image Silver Cross

Silver Cross

B. Kent Anderson. Forge, $25.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-7653-2862-5

Anderson offers variations on a theme in this solid sequel to 2011’s Cold Glory. Once again, Meg Tolman, deputy director but effective head of an X-Files–like federal agency, the Research and Investigations Office, teams with history professor Nick Journey after the discovery of a Civil War–era document is connected with a suspicious death. In a prologue set in 1864, Confederate spy Rose Greenhow drowns near the mouth of North Carolina’s Cape Fear River while attempting to insure the safety of a letter of support from Napoleon III to Jefferson Davis. In the present, Tolman is shocked to learn that her cellist friend, Dana Cable, has suffered a fatal accident while walking on a seawall near the mouth of the Cape Fear River. At Cable’s funeral, an unknown woman slips Tolman an envelope containing the letter Greenhow was trying to deliver. Those looking for something similar but superior to David Golemon’s Event Group novels will be rewarded. Agent: George Bick, Doug Grad Literary. (Nov.)