Washoe County Library System

In 1908, international tensions mount as the world plunges toward war. When a brilliant American battleship gun designer dies in an apparent suicide, the man's grief-stricken daughter turns to the legendary Van Dorn Detective Agency to clear her father's name. Van Dorn puts his chief investigator on the case, and Isaac Bell soon realizes that the clues point to murder not suicide. When more suspicious deaths occur, Bell realizes that a spy is killing...

Thwarting the attempted assassination of a U.S. Senator, detective Isaac Bell traces the attack to a plot involving the nearly constructed Panama Canal and a local insurgency that would prevent its completion.

"As Van Dorn private detective Isaac Bell strives to land a government contract to investigate John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly, the case takes a deadly turn. A sniper begins murdering opponents of Standard Oil, and soon the assassin-shooting with extraordinary accuracy at seemingly impossible long range-kills Bell's best witness, a brave and likable man. Then the shooter detonates a terrible explosion that sets the victim's independent...