Seven for a Secret (Timothy Wilde, #2)

Timothy Wilde, a "copper star" in the newly-formed New York City police force, has a conflict on his hands. He needs to find out what happened to a woman and child who were abducted from their home by "black birders," men who recover escaped slaves who fled north and who sometimes capture free blacks and take them south to be enslaved. But he also is expected to enforce the law, and the law says people who are property must be returned to their owners. Because he can't support slavery and refuses to take the side of kidnappers, he falls afoul of his own workplace and of Tamany Hall. With the help of his wild and exasperating brother Valentine, a fire-obsessed drug addict with political connections, he tries to find and save Lucy Adams, her mixed-race sister, and her young boy. Like the first in this series, Gods of Gotham, this is a brilliant evocation of 1840s New York. Though occasionally characters use anachronistic phrases, most of the first-person narrative is in a luscious vernacular that brings the past to life. returnreturnI was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of this book through the Early Reviewers program. I also wrote a review of this terrific book for Reviewing the Evidence.