Jekyll Island, Georgia, 1907, with a mystery reaching back to 1851.
At the height of the Gilded Age, the Jekyll Island Club is a secluded winter refuge for some of America's wealthiest and most powerful men. Fortunes are discussed behind closed doors, reputations are protected, and discretion is treated almost as a condition of membership.
Then there is Sebastian Vale.
Vale is not a member. He receives no bills, appears on no official roll, and occupies a private room that has been kept available for him under instructions passed from one Club manager to the next. He can disappear for months and return without explanation. More troubling is his uncanny ability to understand what powerful men intend before they reveal it, offering advice that can save fortunes or expose secrets they believed safely hidden.
Some have come to think of him as the Club's unofficial fifty-fourth man.
Financier Edwin Harcourt becomes fascinated by Vale after discovering an 1879 photograph taken at Chicago's Palmer House. Among the prominent men pictured is someone who looks remarkably like Sebastian Vale, carrying what appears to be the same distinctive cane.
And beside him is a cat bearing an unsettling resemblance to Vale's gray companion, Croesus.
What begins as curiosity becomes an obsession. Harcourt searches old records, correspondence, hotel archives, and forgotten histories. Instead of explaining the photograph, his investigation uncovers evidence that pushes the mystery farther into the past. Another photograph, taken at New York's Astor House in 1851, appears to show Vale among Cornelius Vanderbilt, William Backhouse Astor Sr., A. T. Stewart, and Franklin Pierce.
The obvious explanation is that these men are Vale's ancestors.
But not everyone remembers it that way.
Then Harcourt is found dead.
Club manager Alistair Pembroke must determine whether Harcourt's death resulted from his investigation of Vale or from other secrets he uncovered along the way. Missing notebook pages, a family grievance, a late-night confrontation, and evidence removed from Harcourt's room reveal that more than one person had reason to fear what he knew.
Solving Harcourt's death, however, proves easier than solving Sebastian Vale.
As Alistair follows Harcourt's trail, the dates accumulate: 1851. 1868. 1871. 1879. 1907. Each clue can be explained individually through inheritance, coincidence, family tradition, or deception. Together, they suggest something far more difficult to dismiss.
Perhaps Sebastian Vale belongs to a remarkable family whose sons inherit the same name, appearance, possessions, and relationships with powerful men.
Or perhaps the man quietly walking the halls of Jekyll Island in 1907 has been walking through American history much longer than anyone should be able to remember.
