The Bronze Hand: 1897

Baltimore, on the eve of the Civil War. A city of gaslit streets and darker secrets, where a secret political organization holds life and death in its grip. When the enigmatic Miss Calhoun recruits the principled Abbott to recover her stolen ring, he enters a labyrinth of conspiracy where nothing is as it seems. The ring is no mere trinket: it is the key to a mechanism of judgment, a bronze hand capable of delivering arbitrary justice. As Abbott digs deeper, he uncovers a shadow government with dangerous intentions, and learns the terrible truth: an innocent man's life hangs in the balance. What follows is a harrowing test of moral courage, as Abbott must choose between personal loyalty and the abstract demands of justice. Green, one of America's first detective fiction writers, builds her mystery with the precision of a legal mind (her father was a lawyer) and the atmospheric dread of the best Victorian gothic. The Bronze Hand is less a puzzle to be solved than a meditation on what justice means when power operates in secret.