The Black Hills

Trow’s lightweight sixth Grand and Batchelor Victorian mystery (after 2018’s The Ring) takes English enquiry agents Matthew Grand and James Batchelor to Washington, D.C., where Civil War hero George Custer, now the commander of Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Dakota Territory, hires them to watch his back as he testifies before a committee in the 1870s regarding a corruption scandal involving the secretary of war. When a senator walking with Custer is killed by a runaway cab, the two detectives deduce that the intended victim was Custer. Grand and Batchelor later return with Custer to Fort Lincoln, where they gossip with the ladies at tea and take part in evening singalongs, until a soldier is shot while riding Custer’s favorite horse. Trow skillfully mines the rich vein of controversy that surrounds Custer, though the unflattering portrait of Ulysses S. Grant (“the most corrupt president we’ve had since Martin van Buren,” according to one character) will strike some readers as an inaccurate caricature of the 18th president. Those who don’t mind cardboard characters with often peculiar motives will have fun. (Jan.)