Assassin's Blood — Malcolm Shuman

Experience has taught Baton Rouge contract archaeologist Dr. Alan Graham that the picturesque landscape of Louisiana is rich with history that is both glorious ....and deadly.

The tiny town of Jackson, Louisiana, is the site of Alan's newest investigation. The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers has sent Alan and his crew to inventory a tract of land slated to be flooded for a dam. But it's an investigation of another sort that soon draws Alan's attention when he stumbles upon a ramshackle cabin in the woods that the locals say is haunted by the ghost of its one-time resident: Lee Harvey Oswald.

Local folklore has it that Oswald visited Jackson a few months before the Kennedy assassination, and his ghost still lingers on the vast property Alan's staff is evaluating. That's in the past, however. Alan is more concerned withthe estate's recent history, and the unsolved murder of its owner, who was shot withthe same type of rifle that Oswald used. But it's not a ghost that shoots one of Alan's interns while she sifts through recovered artifacts. Nor is it Oswald's spirit who murders a local resident before he can talk with Alan. Now Alan is hurled into two mysteries: one involving the present, the other surrounding the darkest moment in twentieth-century America.