The Lincoln Conspiracy (43 page)

Then he walked out into the city to buy a new pair of boots.

On the train for Baltimore later that day, he watched porters scramble on the platform for luggage, and then he settled back into his seat as the locomotive left the station, wheel upon rail, wheel upon rail, wheel upon rail.

T
he literature and online resources surrounding Abraham Lincoln, his assassination, and the social, political, and economic upheavals of the Civil War era are vast and I can’t cite everything that I read or dipped into online and off as I did research for this novel. But in addition to acknowledging digital and print records at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum, the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and
The New York Times
, I’m particularly indebted to the following books:
Mary Todd Lincoln
by Jean H. Baker;
Alley Life in Washington
by James Borchert;
The Age of Lincoln
by Orville Vernon Burton;
The Irish in America
by Michael Coffey and Terry Golway;
Lincoln
by David Herbert Donald;
The Lincolns
by Daniel Mark Epstein;
The Secret War for the Union
by Edwin C. Fishel;
Reconstruction
by Eric Foner;
Freedom Rising
by Ernest B. Furgurson;
Team of Rivals
by Doris Kearns Goodwin;
American Brutus
by Michael W. Kauffman;
Behind the Scenes
by Elizabeth Keckley;
The American Irish
by Kevin Kenny;
Throes of Democracy
by Walter A. McDougall;
A Nation of Counterfeiters
by Stephen Mihm;
Police in Urban America, 1860–1920
by Eric H. Monkkonen;
Washington Through Two Centuries
by Joseph R. Passonneau;
Old Washington, D.C
. by Robert Reed;
The Grand Review
by Georg R. Sheets;
The Trial
edited by Edward Steers, Jr.;
Book of Poisons
by Serita Stevens and Anne Bannon;
Lincoln
by Gore Vidal.

A special thanks to Lieutenant Nicholas Breul of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., who gave me a primer on the history of policing in Washington and also gave me a copy of an 1893 history of the department,
DofC Police
.

I hope every writer winds up with an editor as graceful, smart, genuine, and committed as Mark Tavani. I know they won’t, because Mark is unique, but everyone deserves a creative partner like him. I probably didn’t deserve him, but I got him anyway. This book would have been much shallower without Mark’s involvement.

I landed in Mark’s hands through the efforts of Linda Marrow, who descended upon this work like an angel, because she is an angel. As the world turns, Jim Impoco led me to Linda, as he has to many other good things.

Andrew Blauner has been my agent for fourteen years and a friend for even longer. He is unwavering and decent and manages to be so in Manhattan, where the hunger to be otherwise can sometimes run deep.

My friend Mark Alexander and my brother, Michael O’Brien, read and helped improve early drafts of this novel.

Other than Mark Tavani, my closest and most important reader was my wife, Devon Corneal, who always arrives, eyes shining, with gifts of every stripe, including laughter, children, patience, and warmth.

When I was ten years old, my father’s uncle, Arthur Mahony, gave me Carl Sandburg’s three-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln for my birthday, and that’s where much of this began for me. A hat tip to you, Unc, with gratitude for teaching me early on that one of the best things I could do for my lovely sons, Jeffrey and Cooper, was to give them books.

T
IMOTHY
L. O’B
RIEN
is the executive editor at the Huffington Post, where he oversees all of the site’s original reporting efforts. Tim edited a ten-part series about severely wounded war veterans, “Beyond the Battlefield,” for which the Huffington Post and its senior military correspondent, David Wood, received a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2012

Prior to joining the Huffington Post, in early 2011, Tim was an editor at
The New York Times
, where he oversaw the Sunday Business section. Tim helped direct a team of
Times
reporters that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service in 2009, for coverage of the financial crisis. The
Times
series that emerged from that work, “The Reckoning,” was also a winner of a 2009 Loeb Award for Distinguished Business Journalism.

Prior to becoming Sunday Business editor in 2006, Tim was a staff writer with the
Times
. Among the topics he has written about for the paper are Wall Street, Russia, Manhattan’s art world, cybercrimes and identity theft, geopolitics, international finance, digital media, Hollywood, terrorism and terrorist financing, money laundering, gambling, and white-collar fraud. He was part of a
Times
team that won a Loeb Award in 1999.

O’Brien has a BA cum laude in literature from Georgetown University. He also has an MA in U.S. history, an MS in journalism, and an MBA, all from Columbia University. He has lived and worked in Europe, South America, and Asia. He currently lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife and children.