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

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.