**Detective Isaac Bell travels the early-twentieth-century American
railways, driven by a sense of justice and a determination to stop a new
mastermind reigning terror on a crucial express line in this #1 New
York Times-bestselling series.
**
A year of financial panic and labor unrest, 1907 sees train wrecks,
fires, and explosions sabotage the Southern Pacific Railroad's Cascades
express line. Desperate for help the railroad hires the fabled Van Dorn
Detective Agency. Van Dorn's best man, Isaac Bell, quickly discovers a
mysterious saboteur haunting the hobo jungles of the West. Known only as
the Wrecker, he recruits vulnerable accomplices from the down-and-out to
attack the railroad, and then kills them afterward. The Wrecker
traverses the vast spaces of the American West as if he had wings,
striking wherever he pleases, causing untold damage and loss of human
life. Who is he? What does he want? Is he a striker? An anarchist? A
revolutionary determined to displace the "privileged few"? A criminal
mastermind engineering some as yet unexplained scheme?
Whoever he is, whatever his motives, the Wrecker knows how to create
maximum havoc, and Bell senses that he is far from done--that, in fact,
the Wrecker is building up to a grand act unlike anything he has
committed before. If Bell doesn't stop him in time, more than a railroad
could be at risk--it could be the future of the entire country.