Bloody Copper, Roaring Lead

Prohibition, 1926. Chicago is known as the "wettest city in America." Cops are on the take, bootleggers operate out in the open, and violence is commonplace. It's a town where a private eye like Horace Freem can make a living from the scofflaws and the law-abiding alike as long as he knows the angles to play. And Freem knows there's always an angle to play. His latest case is no exception: Thomas Hendricks, the son of a wealthy but faltering Chicago family has gone missing. Gone with him are the location of a copper fortune that any miner would kill for and a suitcase stuffed with forty-five thousand dollars to mine it. The money for solving the case is too much to pass up, and the trail of Thomas Hendricks will take Freem from the stained streets and ivory towers of Chicago to the hardscrabble mining towns and ranches of Ely, Nevada. It’s not long before Thomas's disappearance looks more like a murder, but Nevada's Copper City is a different game from the windy one Freem knows. In the high desert, a patronizing smile and a quick remark don’t get you as much as a loaded gun in a quick hand. And with cowboys and locals lining up to show Freem the way back home on a train or in a box, he'll have to be a fast study in how things work in the West if he wants to solve the mystery of what happened to Thomas Hendricks.