Major Abel Jones is sent by Abraham Lincoln to a small Pennsylvania mining town to investigate the death of a general, killed on a recruiting mission. The Irish miner who confessed to the murder was reported to have died of cholera. Jones doesn’t believe it and digs up the general’s corpse to discover a murdered woman. His investigations lead him to suspect the local priest, a visiting Russian and finally the crazy wife of the man who was supposed to be in the grave. It turns out that the local mine owner, now wanting his cheap labor going off to war, told the woman that the general would be taking her husband. The woman in the grave was the miner’s sister, also killed by his wife because she tried to prevent their marriage. The priest was in love with the murdered woman, but that was his only crime. The Russian had gone there to kill the general, but the general was already dead when he got there.

Jones solves crimes more by bumbling and mistake than by deduction, but the books are well written and the Civil War setting is interesting.