The Nathan Tower Espionage Series

About the Series

In the years after the Civil War, the United States had no real intelligence service — and Commander Nathan Tower built one anyway.

Operating out of a modest post at the Office of Naval Intelligence, Tower assembles a network of operatives who work in the shadows of Gilded Age Washington, Europe, and the Americas: gathering secrets, running operations no one will officially acknowledge, and defending American interests against rivals who have been playing this game far longer. Tower himself rarely takes the field. He orchestrates — recruiting, training, and deploying operatives whose skills he understands better than they do themselves.

The Nathan Tower Espionage Series is historical spy fiction grounded in real events, real institutions, and real historical figures of the 1860s–1880s. Each book stands on its own — new readers can start anywhere — but longtime readers will find a network of characters, relationships, and consequences that deepens across the series.

The series can be read in any order, but for readers who want the full arc, the suggested order is below: the prequel novellas first, then the main sequence of novels, with the short story collection filling in the gaps between them.

READ MORE ABOUT THE SERIES HERE 

New from the I'm No Expert, But series: Bletchley Park.

You've probably seen a movie about this. Here's what the movie left out: the Polish mathematicians who broke Enigma first, the Americans who showed up with a codebreaking machine of their own, and the wartime intelligence-sharing agreement that quietly became the alliance the modern world still runs on.

Seven things that surprised me most, plus a bonus chapter on the computer nobody credits as the first one — because it stayed classified for thirty years.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HDMLR471

There Must Come a Change

 Before Jackie Robinson, there were the Pythians.

In the summer of 1869, a team of young Black men took the field against white opponents in Philadelphia—the first recorded interracial baseball game in American history. They called themselves the Pythians, and their captain was Octavius Valentine Catto: scholar, athlete, Civil War veteran, and the most dangerous Black man in Philadelphia.

Catto and his teammates weren't just playing baseball. They were waging a campaign for equality, using athletic excellence to challenge the assumptions of a nation struggling to define itself after the Civil War. When organized baseball formally banned Black players in 1867, the Pythians applied anyway. When they were rejected, they kept playing—and kept winning.

There Must Come a Change tells the full story of this remarkable team: their undefeated 1868 season, their historic games against white opponents, and the tragic Election Day in 1871 when Catto was assassinated on the streets of Philadelphia while defending the right of Black men to vote.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GFXVY5Q3

John Paul Jones: Seven Things You Should Know.

 John Paul Jones didn't start out as Jones. He started out as a fugitive. Before he was America's most famous naval hero, he was a Scottish merchant captain named John Paul, fleeing a killing in the Caribbean under circumstances that make "self-defense" both true and not the whole story. 

He took a new name, landed in Virginia, and started building the legend we know today — a legend that turns out to be considerably stranger than the statue suggests.

Friends of Liberty podcast series

The complete Friends of Liberty podcast series remains available at friendsofliberty.substack.com. This Revolutionary War series contains 36 episodes, all with stories about the war for independence that you have probably never heard. We dig deep and find the spies, the enslaved Americans, and the unsung heroes and heroines that historians have left behind.

Thousands of people pledged their lives, liberties, and fortunes (people such as Patience Wright, pictured at right) to help this nature free itself from a king and an arrogant Parliament who thought they could tax and act with impunity. This podcast gives you just a few of their stories. Take some time during this 250th year celebration to find out more about these folks — people we who should not be forgotten.

Grace for All

Scripture gives us some very specific instructions on how we should act as a people and as a nation. The Grace for All daily devotional podcast examines some of these commands — not suggestions, commands — through the month of July. Available wherever you get your podcasts or at https://www.1stchurch.org/podcast. Subscribe at graceforall.substack.com to receive the daily devotion by email.

A visit with some old "friends"

 I am taking this late summer period to visit some old friends and to try to find some new ones. Author friends, I mean. I am returning to some authors I have read before and reading some of the publications that I have missed. One of those old "friends" is Walter Mosley, a writer of extraordinary talent and range. I had read several of his Easy Rawlins mysteries and just finished his first Joe King Oliver book. 

Mosley's writing drives straight into the action and holds you there until he is finished with you. So much of what I read these days is filler material — descriptions and items peripheral to the plot. Mosley doesn't write like that. His work puts you in the middle of the action and manages to keep you there even when he's spinning out a back story. Good stuff and highly recommended.

Allan Pinkerton: The Detective Who Helped Define American Intelligence

In January 1861, a Scottish immigrant named Allan Pinkerton learned of a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln during his inaugural journey to Washington. Pinkerton had been hired to investigate threats to a Baltimore railroad, but the intelligence he gathered pointed toward something far more dangerous. He rerouted Lincoln’s travel, moved the president-elect through Baltimore in the middle of the night under an assumed name, and delivered him safely to Washington. It was, in miniature, what would become the practice of American intelligence.

Pinkerton had come to the United States from Glasgow in 1842, fleeing Scotland after his involvement in Chartist political activities. He settled in Illinois, became a deputy sheriff, and in 1850 founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency with the motto “We Never Sleep.” His early cases involved railroad theft, counterfeiting, and the kind of interstate crime that local police forces were structurally unable to handle.

Book Spotlight: The Lost Dynasty

 They went from last place to dynasty in two years. Then they vanished from history—but their revolution changed sports forever.

In 1892, the Baltimore Orioles were the worst team in professional baseball: 46-101, terrible defense, no strategy, empty stands. When manager Ned Hanlon took control, he didn't just rebuild a team—he revolutionized the entire sport.

Within two years, Hanlon's Orioles had won the first of three consecutive championships through methods that were unprecedented in professional athletics. They didn't rely on raw talent or power hitting. Instead, they developed systematic approaches to every aspect of the game: the famous "Baltimore Chop," coordinated hit-and-run plays, defensive positioning based on analytical preparation, and psychological warfare that intimidated opponents before games even began.

This was the birth of "scientific baseball"—and it changed everything.

Willie Keeler's precise, situational hitting. John McGraw's aggressive tactical leadership. Hughie Jennings's defensive coordination. Together, they proved that intelligence and systematic preparation could overcome any advantage in talent or resources. Their innovations established the foundation for modern professional sports—from defensive shifts and situational strategies to sports analytics and systematic player development.

But success bred destruction.

JPROF-First Inning Press newsletter

 

 Jim publishes a newsletter every Friday that contains a variety of articles, news about his books, and giveaways. The newsletter is free. You can sign up for it at JPROF.com.

Book Spotlight: Vicksburg

 Seven Things You Should Know

Everyone knows Gettysburg.

Almost nobody really knows Vicksburg — and that gap is worth closing, because a strong case can be made that Vicksburg, not Gettysburg, was the war's most consequential battle. It took a year of failed campaigns, a gamble that worried even Lincoln, a fleet running past enemy guns in the dark, and forty-seven days of a city living underground — but when Vicksburg finally fell, it split the Confederacy in two and handed Lincoln the general who would go on to end the war.

Seven Things You Should Know About the Battle of Vicksburg is out now — short, surprising, and worth the forty-five minutes.

When the News Needs a Little Explanation

 The headlines move fast. The context rarely keeps up.

That's the idea behind four titles from the I'm No Expert, But library that happen to line up with what's dominating the news right now: a chokepoint in the Persian Gulf, a war grinding through its third year in Eastern Europe, the fossil fuels that quietly run almost everything, and a trade policy tool that keeps showing up in headlines without much explanation of how it actually works.

Each book follows the same premise. I'm not an expert. I went looking anyway, and I came back with seven things that surprised me enough to write down.

Seven Things You Should Know About the Strait of Hormuz explains why a 21-mile-wide waterway can move oil markets and foreign policy in the same afternoon. Seven Things You Should Know About the War in Ukraine lays out the mechanics behind a conflict most of us only see in fragments. Seven Things You Should Know About Oil and Gas covers the industry that shapes gas prices, geopolitics, and a good chunk of the evening news, whether we notice it or not. Seven Things You Should Know About Tariffs untangles a word that gets thrown around constantly and understood rarely.

None of these books argue a side. They're not trying to. The goal is the same one behind every title in the series: explain the mechanism, name the disagreement where experts have one, and trust the reader to take it from there.

If the news has left you nodding along without quite following, one of these might be worth the hour (or less) it takes to read. All available on Amazon.

Strait of Hormuz: Seven Things You Should Know

War in Ukraine: Seven Things You Should Know

Oil and Gas: Seven Things You Should Know

Tariffs: Seven Things You Should Know