The Lincoln government has dispatched Jones to a remote northern county where one Federal agent after another has been murdered. Fresh from his journey - and still recovering from a bout of typhoid - he encounters brutality in a churchyard and an unsettling reception from the local authorities. Before the first day of his mission ends, he meets a disfigured effigy of himself, dangling in the winter wind, with a sign board that warns: look heer and no yur fate.That "great blaze of brains," Secretary of State William Seward, worries about an immigrant insurrection, but Jones discovers instead a haunted world in which lost loves appear from beyond the grave and a girl's cough hints at blood to come. While Jones struggles to make sense of a society set on end, the war bleeds on in a distant winter campaign ... where a cherished friend has his own tie to the murders. Read Less