When the Morton Street Slasher leaves the corpses of his victims on the tangled gaslit streets near San Francisco's Union Square, he marks each body with a playing card. Ambrose "Bitter" Bierce, the city's famed newspaperman, immediately blames the rash of murders on his sworn enemies, the Southern Pacific Railway magnates. Bierce and his young protege at the Hornet, Tom Redmond, set out to solve the case, uncovering conspiracy and corruption at every turn. Smart, funny, and compulsively readable, Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades is more than a simple murder mystery. Like Caleb Carr's The Alienist and E. L. Doctorow's The Waterworks, it exposes the sordid underbelly of Gilded Age America."Hall conjures up a wonderfully yeasty San Francisco in the 1870s. . . . The dialogue and detail are sung with perfect pitch."-- Chicago Tribune"Oakley Hall is a novelist who never seems to make a wrong move. . . . He is a writer to read again and again."-- Richard Ford"One of the country's finest writers"(Robert Stone)