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 one with a playing card. First the Ace of Spades. Then the Deuce. And so on in menacing succession. Ambrose Bierce, the city's enigmatic newspaperman, famed cynic, and occasional sleuth, immediately blames the rash of murders on his old enemy, the Southern Pacific Railroad. Tom Redmond, a naive reporter at Bierce's Hornet, doggedly pursues the case, uncovering conspiracy and corruption at every turn. In a fast-paced story that is at once a murder mystery, historical novel, and quirky biography, Oakley Hall draws the reader into the tumultuous world of California in the years after the gold rush.