The Shut Mouth Society by James D. Best is the kind of book I like
best.
It
starts with a rich collector who has discovered an early Abraham Lincoln
document. The collector asks two people to authenticate the manuscript: Greg
Evarts, a detective, and Patricia Baldwin, a professor. The professor, of
course, is not only smart but stinking rich and beautiful. The novel has
everything from intrigue and murder to romance.
The
story begins in California and progresses to the historical east coast where
the reader is introduced to private libraries, secret apartments, and shown how
rich and powerful civil war descendants live. Conspiracies and secret societies
from the Civil War era are unveiled in such a realistic manner that, when I
finished the book, I actually did some research to separate fact from fiction.