Black Damp

Butte, Montana. Summer 1894. The richest hill on earth is also the most dangerous - not because of what's underground, but because of what's happening above it. Marcus Daly and William Andrews Clark are fighting for control of Montana's politics, its newspapers, and its courts, and every man on the Hill has already chosen a side.

When political operative Gerald Marsh is found dead at the bottom of the Number Seven shaft and ruled an accidental fall, Reverend Elias Cane arrives in the most Catholic, most Irish, most complicated city he has ever ridden into. The deputy marshal has a mine captain in jail - a man named Riordan who argued with Marsh on the street two days before he died. The case is clean and the case is wrong.

A Chinese apothecary saw two men enter the shaft house and one man leave. A company physician documented bruising that doesn't match a fall. And someone at Daly's own newspaper has been selling him to the other side.

The mine keeps its secrets in the dark. Cane intends to bring them up.

Black Damp - the ninth Circuit Rider Mystery from Jim Head.