Fictional heroes, real villains

Conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination abound even more than half a century after the fact. By contrast, the Lincoln assassination seems cut and dried. John Wilkes Booth did it, with a little help from his friends. But novelist Timothy L. O'Brien imagines a conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln as wild and outlandish as any of those invented to explain the John F. Kennedy assassination in The Lincoln Conspiracy (2012).

O'Brien's hero is Temple McFadden, a tall police detective with a bad leg whose cane is his weapon of choice. During a violent encounter at the Washington railroad station soon after the assassination, Temple recovers two diaries someone is willing to kill for and, he soon discovers, he may have to die for. One diary, written partly in code, is that of John Wilkes Booth. The other is that of Mary Todd Lincoln, the dead president's widow. Temple resolves to hide the diaries until he can uncover what makes them so important.

Trying to claim them are Allan Pinkerton, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and, the most ruthless of all, Union spy Lafayette Baker, all real individuals. Mrs. Lincoln, her son Robert and Sojourner Truth are among other real people with important supporting roles in the story.

On Temple's side are his wife, Fiona, one of the first female doctors in the country and a woman as resourceful as her husband, and Augustus, a former slave who is his right-hand man and very able in spite of his drug addiction. Temple himself has a gambling addiction, so it falls to Fiona, who appears to be perfect, to keep them straight.

In the early going of this novel, I was smitten. I wondered if O'Brien had written a second Temple McFadden novel yet. By the end, I didn't care, for I had no intention of reading it. The promising beginning of this historical thriller turns increasingly preposterous and disappoints in the end.