The Freedman Legacy - Book Club Edition

Washington, D.C., 1885. On a single night, four prominent Black businessmen are attacked across the city. One is murdered. One barely escapes. And the man who knows why all of them were targeted is already dead - his death ruled a suicide by a police department that asked no further questions.Professor Sylvester Watkins survived the attack on him, and he intends to find out who ordered it. His investigation leads him into the shadow of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company - the bank that collapsed in 1874, taking the savings of thousands of freed men and women with it - and into a conspiracy that reaches from the back rooms of Black Washington all the way to the halls of Congress and the drawing rooms of the diplomatic corps.Commander Nathan Tower of the Office of Naval Intelligence has his own problem. A naval appropriations bill he has fought for years keeps failing in subcommittee - always three votes short, always the same three congressmen switching sides. When Lucinda Meadows, Tower’s most perceptive operative, overhears a fragment of conversation at a diplomatic reception, the two investigations begin to converge on a single, dangerous figure: a man known as Cornelius Van Houten, attached to the Dutch legation, charming and cultured and not at all who he claims to be.The Freedman Legacy is a novel about what happens when foreign powers discover that the wounds America inflicts on its own people can be turned into weapons. It is also a novel about the men and women - Black and white, insider and outsider - who work in the shadows to stop them.This Book Club Edition includes a reader’s guide with fifteen discussion questions, five historical notes on the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, Frederick Douglass, Howard University, and baseball in 1880s Washington, and a personal statement from the author on why he chose this place and time to set a spy novel.