The Pullman Porter's Witness
A 1920s Railroad Mystery

About this book:

On the midnight rails between Chicago and the West Coast, the men in navy caps and white jackets are treated as invisible—and Arthur Mercer has spent twenty years turning that blindness into his sharpest weapon. He reads the passengers' secrets in the scuff of a shoe, the tremor of a hand, the clay on a boot heel that doesn't belong on any Chicago platform. But aboard the *Midnight Special* in October 1925, the secrets are darker than usual: a financier with a briefcase he won't set down, a woman fleeing into the night with an attorney who dressed in the dark, and a lead freight seal snapped clean in two, left behind in a drawing room where two voices whispered of burned ledgers and a telegraph clerk who knew too much.

When the conductor's blind eye meets the color line, the porter becomes the only witness who matters. From the smoking car to the linen closet, from the bootlegger's manifest to the heiress in Car Twelve, Arthur navigates a rolling powder keg of Prohibition money, corporate fraud, and the quiet, lethal dangers of being a Black man who sees too much in Jim Crow America. The rhythm of the rails counts down the hours until the next stop—but the killer aboard Car 104 isn't waiting for the schedule.

Rich with the hiss of steam, the clack of track joints, and the unspoken language of the Pullman porter, *The Pullman Porter's Witness* delivers a locked-train mystery where every passenger has a motive, every berth hides a lie, and the truth rides in the pocket of the one man no one thinks to ask.