The Meriwether Murder

By Malcolm Shuman

In a decaying plantation graveyard, Alan Graham finds a clue to a great American mystery.

The headstone reads Louis, and when Pepper Courtney finds it, she assumes it belonged to a slave. But when the old woman who owns the crumbling plantation house gives her an ancestor's diary, Courtney discovers that Louis was a white man whose drifter's appearance concealed a gentleman's manners. Who was this stranger, and why did he die with the president's name on his lips? Courtney's boss, contract archaeologist Alan Graham, has a radical theory – and there are those who would kill to keep it quiet.

Based on the diary, the dig, and the scant historical records, Graham believes the headstone may have belonged to explorer Meriwether Lewis, who was said to have died in Tennessee but may have survived to make a new life in Louisiana. To solve this centuries-old mystery, he will have to catch a modern-day killer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784089658

Malcolm Shuman

Malcolm Shuman is an American author and archaeologist from Louisiana. After serving in the US Army, Shuman pursued doctoral studies in the field of cultural anthropology. He has been on the faculty of universities including Texas A&I and Louisiana State, and continues to work as a contract archaeologist. Shuman has also published fifteen mystery novels under various pseudonyms. He lives with his wife in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

Reviews for The Meriwether Murder

[thornton37814 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Alan Graham is an archaeologist who often contracts for the Corps of Engineers. In this book, there is a grave for a man named Louis buried on the Desiree Plantation which is in the vicinity of his latest assignment. The plantation's caretaker turns up dead. Old diaries, old documents, buried secrets . . . could this be the body of noted explorer Meriwether Lewis. While most of the action is in Louisiana, there is a trip up the Natchez Trace Parkway to Hohenwald, Tennessee near the Park Service Monument.Our family owns a membership in a camping resort very near Hohenwald so I've been to that part of the Trace a lot. I had, however, never been exposed to the legend that Lewis had survived the bullet wound until I read this book. I think this is a case where one of history's mysteries has led to a very interesting modern day mystery. I enjoyed this mystery and hope to read more of Shuman's archaeological mysteries in the future.