Oakley Hall. Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades (1998) 261 pp.
Publisher’s description: “When the Morton Street Slasher leaves the corpses of his victims on the tangled gaslit streets near San Francisco’s Union Square, he marks each one with a playing card. First the Ace of Spades. Then the Deuce. And so on in menacing succession. Ambrose Bierce, the city’s enigmatic newspaperman, famed cynic, and occasional sleuth, immediately blames the rash of murders on his old enemy, the Southern Pacific Railroad. Tom Redmond, a naïve reporter at Bierce’s Hornet, doggedly pursues the case, uncovering conspiracy and corruption at every turn.”