Hall unveils the sequel to his Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades. Once again, the hero is the historical figure Ambrose Bierce, William Randolph Hearst's star journalist and San Francisco's most celebrated writer. This time Bierce is investigating the disappearance of a Hawaiian princess attached to King Kalakaua's entourage. While the aged king slowly expires in the Palace Hotel's Royal Suite, San Francisco plays host to a throng of Hawaiian royal courtiers and counselors embroiled in a swirl of political intrigue surrounding the successor to the throne. As Bierce and his protege, Tom Redmond, search for the missing princess, Hall weaves a wonderfully tangled narrative of murder and mystery. Intelligent, gripping, and often very funny, Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings will appeal to all readers of mysteries, adventure tales, and historical novels.

Ambrose Pierce and the Death of Kings, Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues. -The Devil's Dictionary DECEMBER, 1890 Ambrose Bierce was at the height of his powers and influence at the time of the tragic Hawaiian affair, with his weekly newspaper column and his nationally admired short stories of supernatural events and the Civil War. He was a prince of San Francisco. Headwaiters sprang to his attention, bartenders bustled to prepare his favorite restorative, Pacific Heights matrons and pretty young poetesses vied for his favors. In his dealings with the opposite gender his motto was When falling into a woman's arms be careful not to fall into her hands. He was described by Gertrude Atherton at about this time as "a tall man, very thin and closely knit, with sandy graying hair, a bristling mustache, beetling brows over frowning eyes, good features and beautiful hands." Atherton had had an unhappy meeting with him. A successful young California novelist with a good figure and a magnificent head of blond hair, she had come to visit the famous man in Sunol, where he was rusticating because of an attack of asthma. He told her that the covers of her last novel were too far apart, and that the genre was an inferior literary form. She responded that story writers were simply incapable of writing novels, and laughed triumphantly when she rebuffed his attempt to kiss her beside a pigsty. He grumbled that she had ruined his day. That was Bad Bierce. Good Bierce was her correspondent for twenty years, loyally praising her work in print and proffering professional advice. He also got her a job as a feminist columnist on the Examiner. Bad Bierce was noisily scornful of the opposite sex: "Intellectually woman is as inferior to man as she is physically . . . she hasn't any thinker." But Good Bierce spent hours editing and emendating the verse his flock of not very talented young poetesses brought him. He was the most brilliant satirist in the country, maybe in the world, maybe since Voltaire, but at this particular time he had no enemies worthy of his steel. In the past, civic and state corruption, especially the Southern Pacific Railroad and Collis B. Huntington, had challenged his indignations. When his resources were not fully engaged his column was reduced to scolding poets and evangelical ministers, "stretching butterflies on the rack," as was said of him. He was, just now, in a low ebb of outrage. I was employed by the Chronicle, which was more respectable than Willie Hearst's Examiner, where Bierce's "Prattle" appeared in the Sunday edition. He had been my journalistic mentor, and he did not hesitate to criticize my published work. For instance, he disapproved of a piece on the Chinese slave girls that I had published in the Atlantic: "Your writing is meritorious, Tom, but I perceive that your motives are wrong," he told me. "You should write for the love of art rather than the purpose of helping repair God's botchwork world." I was less interested in success in "art" than I was in helping to liberate the slave girls. We had not seen as much of each other lately as we had when we were a team of detectives solving the infamous San Francisco playing-card murders. Bierce was separated from his wife and family, and his eldest son Day was a suicide in a love triangle so banal I knew the lack of common dignity must have struck Bierce almost as hard as the personal loss. I had offered him condolences over his tragedy, and he returned the favor over my own. Before the princess disappeared, before the royal counsellor was murdered and the king died at the Palace Hotel, I met my true love, the Hawaiian beauty Miss Haunani Brown. I was writing a magazine piece on San Francisco poets, especially Edward Berowne, who was being honored just the