Riddle of the Notes
Empire Mines, Illinois, 1886
A flooded shaft. A drowned miner. And a cryptic note slipped into Colin MacGregor’s pocket: Close the mine.
When sabotage escalates to murder during the explosive Haymarket riot, the killer leaves a second note clutched in Colin’s dead cousin's hands.
With authorities paralyzed and a union mob storming the gates, Colin seeks his own justice. Captioning a hulking old steamboat with a desperate crew of misfits, he steams down the Mississippi to recruit an army of strikebreakers from the dangerous docks of New Orleans.
Facing deadly river sabotage and bloody brawls, Colin must embrace his darkest instincts to expose the killer before his own empire—and life—burn to the ground.
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The River Wars
Empire Mines, Illinois, 1881
In 1881, the untamed Mississippi River is the lifeblood of a growing nation, but a deadly conspiracy is brewing in its currents. Driven by century-old vengeance over the Louisiana Purchase, a shadowy Parisian Masonic Lodge plans the largest land grab the world has ever known.
Fans of historical romance and pulse-pounding political thrillers will be captivated by The River Wars.
What to expect in this blockbuster read:
- Passionate Frontier Romance: A star-crossed love story between a wealthy coal heir and a daring equestrian, fraught with heartbreak, betrayal, and the fight for a second chance.
- Alternate History Suspense: A gripping, high-stakes "what if" scenario where a hidden French armada savagely attacks the United States from within their own waterways.
- Explosive Action: Cinematic, edge-of-your-seat set pieces, from cliffside dynamite blasts and a deadly stage coach robbery to a terrifying steamboat wreck during a violent storm.
- Deep Conspiracies: Uncover the sinister plots of secret Masonic lodges, paid Parisian rioters, and ruthless tycoons pulling the strings of a global war.
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20 Curiosities about the Mississippi River
- Mark Twain returned and wrote river history: In 1882, Samuel Clemens returned home to Hannibal, MO, to revisit his youth, which led to his publication of Life on the Mississippi in 1883 and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884–1885.
- The decline of the "Floating Palaces":
- Massive log rafts ruled the Upper Mississippi: The 1880s marked the absolute peak of the white-pine logging boom. Gigantic timber rafts up to five acres in size—containing millions of board feet of timber cut in Wisconsin and Minnesota—were floated downriver pushed by raft-boats to sawmills in Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri.
- The Eads Bridge at St. Louis faced financial warfare: Completed in 1874 with the world's first extensive use of structural alloy steel, the bridge spent the early 1880s in corporate battles between river ferry cartels and robber barons like Jay Gould, who leased and absorbed it into his rail monopoly in 1881.
- River showboats reached their golden era: With small farming landings otherwise cut off from big-city culture, legendary floating theaters like the French's New Sensation toured the Mississippi through the 1880s, announcing their arrival at riverfront landings with loud steam calliopes. But, by the end of the 1880s, luxurious steamboats carrying wealthy passengers were fading fast; river commerce pivoted almost entirely to industrial boats pushing fleets of barges laden with bulk grain, coal, and timber.
- Mark Twain predicted the river couldn't be tamed: Writing in 1883 about the federal levee projects, Twain wryly observed: "Ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey."
- The Mississippi River Commission map project began: In 1881, surveyors began the first precise, comprehensive hydrographic and topographic survey of the entire alluvial valley from Cairo to the Gulf, producing the famous multi-sheet MRC charts that hydrologists still reference.
- The "Father of Waters" was losing to parallel iron rails: Between 1880 and 1889, freight rail lines laid tracks directly along both riverbanks; trains eliminated the uncertainty of low-water sandbars, snags, and winter ice, permanently stripping the river of its monopoly on American domestic shipping.
- Mother-of-pearl buttons: In the late 1880s, German immigrant Johann Boepple discovered that freshwater mussels carpeting the Mississippi River gravel beds around Muscatine, Iowa, were ideal for button-making, quietly setting off the multi-million-dollar pearl button boom.
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Bertram O’Connor
Bertram O’Connor is a mystery thriller novelist and former architect. Riddle of the Notes, a gripping suspense novel set along the dark, shifting currents of the Mississippi River, is his second book, following his debut Empire Western, The River Wars.
Before turning to a life of literary crime, Bertram spent years designing large commercial buildings, discovering that constructing a high-stakes thriller requires the same precise detail, structure and eye for hidden spaces as drafting a skyscraper—only now, the blueprints are made of secrets, motives, and misdirection.
When he isn't mapping out plot twists or researching river mysteries, Bertram enjoys travel, biking and exploring coffee shops.
Bertram lives on a small lake in Texas where, across the lake, a herd of longhorn cattle graze.
Readers can explore behind-the-scenes research, updates on future releases, and sign up for his official newsletter
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Welcome to the 1880's
Thank you for traveling back to 1880 America with me, and for helping untangle these mysteries. If these tales kept you guessing until the final pages, please consider leaving a review on my Amazon’s book product page. Independent mysteries survive entirely on word of mouth. Your review acts as a beacon, helping other thriller readers discover these historic cases.
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