Murder on the Midnight Menagerie

The Bellweather Imperial Circus rolls west from Philadelphia when former crime illustrator Clara Vale and veterinarian Dr. Gabriel Mercer find proprietor August Bellweather dead beside an empty tiger cage.Caesar the Bengal looks guilty. The wounds do not. Bellweather was strangled first, then clawed to sell a lie.A gold cord in a dead man's fist. A hidden key. A missing master ledger. An aerialist attacked in the dark. As the train hammers toward Altoona, Clara learns the circus runs on blackmail, and her supposedly dead mother once kept its books.Gabriel is not the man he claimed to be. A letter in her mother's hand warns Clara not to trust him, or the railroad man with the gold key. Attraction and suspicion share the same cramped cars.Before Pittsburgh, they will have to unmask who killed Bellweather, who staged a tiger, and why a telegram signed E.V. still wants Clara on this train.