Constant War

From the Tennessee River in 1862 to the canals of Amsterdam in 1886, Constant War collects six complete stories set in the world of the Nathan Tower Espionage Series - twenty-four years of intelligence work conducted in the shadows of the Civil War, the Franco-Prussian conflict, the colonial scramble, and the political convulsions of the Gilded Age.These are not summaries of the Nathan Tower novels. They are complete, self-contained stories - each one a window into a corner of the series world that the longer works haven’t had room to explore. An origin story. A Paris winter gone wrong. A confidence operation on the Antwerp docks. Washington drawing rooms in 1884 and 1885. Amsterdam in the summer of the Eel Riots.The six stories, in chronological order:The Monkey’s Fist - Tennessee River, April 1862. Three days before the Battle of Pittsburg Landing, a young Navy lieutenant named Nathan Tower comes aboard a Union gunboat. A sailor named Burley O’Malley is waiting to see what kind of man he is.The Pétroleuse Ledger - Paris, autumn 1871. Tower at twenty-six, new to European intelligence, about to make a mistake he will spend the rest of his career not making again.The Scheldt Deception - Antwerp, 1878. Stolen American naval plans are changing hands on the Scheldt River docks. Tower and Sylvester Watkins - reunited fourteen years after the Kearsarge - devise an operation that leaves no fingerprints.A Woman of Means - Washington, winter 1884. Lucinda Meadows and a woman named Maria Brandt, on opposite sides of an operation neither of them will discuss afterward.White Gold - Washington, summer 1885. Meade Meadows is chasing a story about a foreign lobbyist and three compromised senators. His sister Lucinda is running a parallel operation. Neither of them can tell the other everything.The Amsterdam Margins - Amsterdam, July 1886. Sophie Baumann has been watching Maria Brandt for two months. Then the Eel Riots happen, and Sophie has to decide what she knows and what she’ll do about it.Each story stands on its own. Readers new to the Nathan Tower series will find everything they need inside these pages. Readers who know these characters well will find them in situations the novels have never explored.The war, it turns out, is never fully over. It just moves to a different city.