The Jekyl Island Club
Located on the idyllic Georgia coast, Jekyl Island was the playground of the rich at the turn of the last century. Vanderbilts, Goulds, Rockefellers and other members of elite society vacationed there, enjoying the finest aspects of Southern hospitality that money could buy and importing the rest from New York. Indeed, the money was good: the club's one hundred members controlled one sixth of the nation's wealth. When one of the club's members is shot to death on the island, his fellow captains of industry anxiously conclude it was as a hunting accident.
Is the impending visit to the Jekyl Island Club by President McKinley the only reason? Could J.P. Morgan himself have been the one who pulled the trigger? Whose side is member and millionaire newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer on?
The answer to whether or not the richest of the rich can literally get away with murder lies in the hands of the local sheriff, John Le Brun, a wily Civil War veteran who has his own agenda with the Yankees who bought Jekyl Island.
The Sceptred Isle Club
In 1905, John Le Brun makes his first excursion to England to visit import broker Geoffrey Moore. Le Brun and Moore became friends six years earlier while Le Brun was Sheriff of Brunswick, Georgia and enmeshed in a perplexing murder case at the very exclusive Jekyl Island Club. Now retired, the self-taught Le Brun is fulfilling a long-standing dream of measuring himself against the greatest minds in the greatest city of the greatest empire of that era. Upon his arrival, Moore introduces Le Brun to the social world of the 'men's club' - hundreds of which exist in and about London, where men of similar backgrounds and often great power meet. Chief among Le Brun's new acquaintances is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author and inventor of the great fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes.
While visiting the Sceptred Isle Club, where the ex-sheriff is scheduled to give a lecture, Le Brun and Doyle hear a series of muffled gunshots. A tandem investigation reveals that several prominent men have been murdered inside the gambling room, where the inner door was locked and the heavily-bolted outer door was inexplicably unlocked. There are no survivors, no suspects, and no signs of either the weapon used in the crime or the thousands of pounds being gambled. Le Brun is retained by the club to solve the murders and preserve its reputation. Moving as a stranger in this Edwardian world of elegance and privilege, John Le Brun must unravel a Byzantine crime whose purpose has wide-reaching implications for the entire British Empire.
The Manhattan Island Clubs
In the summer of 1906, a distinguished member of one of New York's most prestigious and powerful men's clubs - the Metropolitan Club - is found with his throat slashed, murdered within the club's walls. By all eyewitness accounts, the murder is another member - a man who, in actuality, wasn't there that night and, in fact, was across town in plain view of a hundred witnesses who can attest to his innocence. To J. P. Morgan, founding member of the Metropolitan Club, there is only one man to which he can trust with the swift and proper resolution of this impossible crime - his one-time nemesis, Sheriff John Le Brun of Jekyl Island, Georgia.
Le Brun, a rough-hewn but brilliant man, is lured to turn of the century New York City by both his own curiosity about the city itself as well as the puzzle of the crime. Thrust in the midst of the cream of Manhattan society and intelligentsia, the elite and the powerful - including actor William Gillette, newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer, architect Stanford White, and financial colossal J. P. Morgan himself - Le Brun finds himself in a deadly struggle and race against time with an unseen foe, a mind perhaps as nimble as his own.
The St. Lucia Island Club
The St. Simons Island Club
When retired Southern sheriff-turned-New York City detective John Le Brun and his wife, Lordis, set sail in 1910 for a long-awaited honeymoon on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, they expect to find relaxation in paradise. However, they soon discover they've been lured to the island, in part, to tout its attributes as a burgeoning vacation retreat to wealthy investors back home. Instead of finding tranquility among the tropical isle's quaint villages and sandy beaches, they encounter a land teeming with racial, social and economic tension. The brutal murders of a local plantation owner's family find John putting his renowned detective skills to use, with Lordis readily playing assistant.
Once again, the shrewd detective must capitalize on his "outsider" status to stay several steps ahead of the locals, many of whom seem to harbor dark motives. Is the culprit one of the white landowners the exclusive St. Lucia Island Club counts among its membership, the descendants of former African slaves said to inhabit the island's inland jungles – or someone else entirely? As the body count rises, John and Lordis race to uncover St. Lucia's deepest mysteries, including secret identities, long-held rivalries and who stands to profit most from the island's future.
The period of this series was an era of great social and political change. Each novel, rich in period detail and filled with actual events of the time, combines the solving of crimes with an important issue of the day, such as the political machinations of the ultra-rich in controlling Washington politicians (again, today, a major issue), women's suffrage, the Irish Question, the intolerance toward immigrants, anti-Semitism and, with the latest novel, the illegal importing of sex slaves through the same route as the last African slaves sixty years earlier.
The year is 1908, and John Le Brun is retired from his long-time position as sheriff of Brunswick, Georgia. Through his several widely publicized solutions to major crimes, he has been able to open a lucrative detective agency in New York City. Because his bride-to-be lives there, he divides his time between the Golden Isles and the Crossroads of the World. While in New York, he is paid a large, up-front retainer, ostensibly by the Titan of Wall Street, J.P. Morgan, to solve the murder of a businessman. This turns out to be a lie – and Morgan himself hires John and his minions to solve the case, which inexorably draws John into the matter of rampant prostitution. One in every three hundred New York City women, he learns, is voluntarily prostituting herself to stay alive or has been tricked into becoming a virtual slave behind elegant brownstone walls. Even as he works on the riddle of his invitation to join the exclusive New Century Club on St. Simons Island, John begins to understand that his two homes are inextricably linked to his investigation.