A deck of playing cards. Three missing kings. One week to live.
In the shark-infested waters of Chicago’s LaSalle Street, shady promoter J. Hamilton Eaves rules a kingdom of “claptrap inventions” and “sucker lists”. But his reign is threatened when he receives a cryptic warning from a mysterious antagonist known only as the “Star of the Night”—a deck of cards missing three kings. It is the same omen that preceded the sudden, mysterious deaths of three other notorious financiers previously exposed as the “crooked kings” of Chicago finance.
Jason Folwell, a brilliant young English mechanical expert recently arrived in America, find himself caught in the center of this deadly game. When a high-stakes theft of $5,100 in securities from the office safe threatens to send his beloved co-worker, Avery Reardon, to prison, Jason is forced into a desperate bargain. To protect her, he signs a false confession and agrees to a life-threatening masquerade: donning Eaves’s signature Prince Albert coat and a face hidden by surgical bandages to act as a decoy for the marked man.
But even the most intricate deceptions cannot stall the “Star of the Night.” When the masquerade ends in a gruesome discovery—a corpse sitting in a swivel chair with “staring eyes”—Jason finds himself branded a thief by the public and hunted by the law. To clear his name and protect the woman he loves, he must dive into the dark underbelly of Goose Island, unravel the technical secrets of the fraudulent Shanks Dictatograph, and unmask a scientific killer who strikes with “silent” and invisible precision.
In a city where every deal is a gamble and the truth is often tied with green string, Jason Folwell is playing for the highest stakes of all: his life, his honor, and his future.