Addy's jubilation over her family's new freedoms is cut short by the news that President Lincoln has been shot and killed.

The novel opens in 1916, the last year of narrator John Surratt's life. Surratt, who has spent the years since Lincoln's death as an obscure shipping clerk, is approached by D.W. Griffith to read from his Civil War diary in Griffith's movie Birth of a Nation. As Surratt reads over his diary for the first time in fifty years, the reader returns to the tumultuous days of 1864, and a chance encounter between Surratt and John Wilkes Booth. Booth, a larger-than-life...

"In the late spring of 1865, as Washington mourns the death of Lincoln, Detective Temple McFadden witnesses a murder at the B&O Railroad Station--and then makes an even more staggering discovery. On his slain friend's body he finds two diaries, one that clearly belongs to Mary Todd Lincoln and one that he learns was penned by John Wilkes Booth. Together, these documents reveal the true depth and reach of the conspiracy behind the assassination"--Provided...

"Twenty-nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln has spent his entire adult life running from his past--from the poverty of the dirt-floor log cabin where he was raised, from the dominion of his uneducated father, and from a failed early courtship. But now, Lincoln's past is racing back to haunt him. It is the summer of 1838, and Springfield is embroiled in a tumultuous, violent political season. All of Springfield's elite have gathered at a grand party to celebrate...