Lambda-Award winning author of the Boystown Mysteries, Marshall Thornton transports readers to early 20th-century Chicago, an era of developing queer subculture, a growing temperance movement and a legendary detective agency.

It's 1913. Lewis Wait lives with his mother and hides behind scholarly texts, until his conservative middle-class life is thrust aside due to financial woes. Without his consent, Lewis' widowed mother arranges an interview for him with his father's last employer: the famous and unscrupulous Pinkerton Detective Agency. But his mother doesn't stop there, she's determined to find her son a wife among her fellow temperance ladies.

Intending to fail so he can return to his studies, Lewis instead discovers a natural talent for deduction. Will he embrace a life as a Pinkerton agent? Amid this, his mother's latest romantic possibility has a few surprises of her own, offering a future he has not considered, as he solves cases that begin to endanger his very life.

First Place - LGBT Mystery - BookFest 2026