Devil's Den

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, June 1923. Weeks before the 60th anniversary reunion of the Civil War#xE2;#xAC;"s climactic battle, an elderly Union veteran is murdered on the battlefield. Seth Armitage, an agent of the newly formed Bureau of Investigation (forerunner to the FBI) is assigned to the case. Armitage, a Virginian and grandson of Confederate soldiers, has recently finished an undercover assignment within the Ku Klux Klan which made him question his southern heritage. Armitage#xE2;#xAC;"s investigation leads him to Peggy Stewart, daughter of a deceased Union veteran who was a comrade of the murder victim. Peggy introduces him to another old soldier, a double amputee and war hero who served with both her father and the murdered man. When this man is also brutally killed, Seth realizes that someone is trying to silence a group of veterans who served together during the Civil War - a dwindling band that shares a terrible secret. Seth and Peggy start a tempestuous love affair. With her help, Armitage discovers a modern conspiracy in the highest corridors of power in Washington DC that will use any means to keep buried the crime that took place 60 years earlier. More veterans are murdered before Seth can locate and warn them. His mission is impeded by the pervasive corruption of the Harding Administration, and he has a near brush with death when his identity is revealed to the Klan. Forced to confront the personal tragedy of the Civil War that has haunted his family for generations, Seth meets the man who killed one of his grandfathers during the battle of Gettsyburg. The burden of the past that Seth carries is expunged when he returns to Gettysburg and learns who awakened the cabal that carried out the series of murders.With real characters such as J. Edgar Hoover and Charles Lindbergh, taut action and close attention to historical detail, Devil#xE2;#xAC;"s Den brings to life a time when America was rapidly evolving into the modern era of automobiles, radio, motion pictures and airplanes, yet the recent past of slavery and the War Between the States was omnipresent. Timothy Ashby has crafted a richly textured novel, filled with the sights, sounds and music of the Prohibition Era, while deftly capturing the echoes of the Civil War.