LINCOLN’S AVENGER
By Jonathan Sweet
Little Rapids Press
173 pgs
History records that the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was shot and killed on a farm in Virginia. The shooter was an army sergeant named Thomas “Boston” Corbett. Corbett’s later life was anything but peaceful. First made famous then later notorious, the man’s days were filled with emotional chaos that ultimately led to a sanitarium for the insane. After escaping that facility, he disappeared until decades later only to die in the Great Hinckley Fire of Minnesota.
The aftermath of that horrendous catastrophe is where Sweet begins his fantastic tale. His protagonist is Henry Stone, a reporter for a Duluth paper. Arriving at the scene, Stone, via several interviews with survivors, discovers Corbett’s fate. This leads him to the ruins of Corbett’s cabin shack, and there he uncovers a steel box containing Corbett’s personal notes. They tell how Corbett, after he escaped from the asylum, began to suspect the man he killed in Virginia was not Booth but rather someone posing as the notorious actor/assassin.
Are these the ravings of a madman? Mere hallucinations brought on by years of questions and public scrutiny? Unable to simply discount what he has uncovered, Stone returns to Deluth and begins his own investigating into Corbett’s past as well as the government’s records relating to Booth’s death. Soon he begins to suspect that a conspiracy exist managed by a group of Southern sympathizers whose motives he can only guess at and perhaps Booth is still among the living.
Writer Sweet weaves a tantalizing historical mystery that pulls the reader along. Building upon known facts whose eerie suppositions, if proven true, could alter the course of American history. “Lincoln’s Avenger” is pure pulp with great characters and an ending readers won’t soon forget.
