It is 1908, and the international tensions are mounting 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 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. When more suspicious deaths follow, it becomes clear that someone is orchestrating...

t is 1902, and a bright, inexperienced young man named Isaac Bell, only two years out of his apprenticeship at the Van Dorn Detective Agency, has an urgent message for his boss. Hired to hunt for radical unionist saboteurs in the coal mines, he is witness to a terrible accident. Given exactly one week to prove his case, Bell quickly finds himself pitted against two of the most ruthless opponents he has ever known.

"In the winter of 1918, the coldest the American Midwest had ever endured, history's most lethal influenza virus was born. Over the next year it flourished, killing as many as 100 million people. It killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years, more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century. There were many echoes of the Middle Ages in 1918: victims turned blue-black and priests...

Sent to the planet Dosadi to investigate the vicious, fearsome human and Gowachin societies there, prior to their destruction, Jorj X. McKie is captured by a ruthless woman whose plan to escape Dosadi involves her changing bodies with McKie.