Justin Scott

It is 1906, and in New York City, the Italian crime group known as the Black Hand (La Mano Nera) is on a spree: kidnapping, extortion, arson. Detective Isaac Bell of the Van Dorn Agency is hired to form a special "Black Hand squad," but the gangsters appear to be everywhere -- so much so that Bell begins to wonder if there are imitators, criminals using the name for the terror effect. And then the murders begin, each one of a man more powerful than...

In 1908, a brilliant American battleship gun designer dies in a sensational 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 not to suicide but to murder.

Bell has never encountered a case -- and an enemy -- quite like the one before him now, though. It is 1910, the age of flying machines is still in its infancy, and newspaper publisher Preston Whiteway is offering $50,000 for the first daring aviator to cross America in less than fifty days. He is even sponsoring one of the prime candidates- an intrepid aviatrix named Josephine Frost -- and that's where Bell, chief investigator for the Van Dorn Detective...

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, and a sniper begins murdering opponents of Standard Oil. Who is the assassin and for whom did he kill? Bell tracks his phantom-like criminal adversary from the "oil fever" regions of Kansas and Texas to Washington, D.C., to the tycoons' enclave of New York, to Russia's war-torn Baku...