Devil’s Den

by Timothy Ashby Book 1 in the Seth Armitage series.

First published 2011

Amazon

2.5(5)

Gettysburg, 1923. Bureau of Investigation agent Seth Armitage, a World War I veteran carrying the psychological effects of his own service, is assigned to the murder of an elderly Union veteran found at Devil’s Den on the eve of the battle’s sixtieth anniversary. The inquiry draws him toward other surviving Civil War soldiers and a chain of violence whose origins lie in the 1863 campaign.

As Armitage follows the case from the battlefield into Washington politics, he encounters obstruction inside the corrupt Harding administration, the ambitions of J. Edgar Hoover and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. The novel links a conspiracy born during the Civil War with the institutions and tensions of the early 1920s, using the murder investigation to explore how the memory of one war shapes veterans of another.