A nameless killer moves along the rail lines of post–Civil War America—depots, stockyards, boardinghouses—always one town ahead of the law. Newspapers call him the Petticoat Butcher. Pinkerton agents Edward Hart and Teddy Meachman call him by another name: Jimmy Ward.

From Indiana battlefields to the boom towns of the 1880s and ’90s, the chase tightens. Farmer-veteran Peter Cornelius, who once knew Ward in uniform, becomes the case’s quiet center—answering hard questions while the agents sort rumor from truth and bodies from headlines. A stint in the Kansas State Penitentiary only hardens Ward and sharpens his patience; iron doors teach him how to wait, and waiting becomes a weapon.

Then comes Elizabeth. In a brief, startling calm, Ward falls in love with a woman who believes a man can lay down his old life like a worn coat. For a moment the tracks go quiet. But old habits and older wounds do not die easy, and the agents know it.

Told in taut, unflinching prose, The Petticoat Butcher is a relentless historical thriller across Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas—a portrait of a nation rebuilding, a man unraveling, and the investigators who refuse to let the dead go unanswered. For readers of gritty historical crime and true-crime–adjacent fiction, this is the hunt you won’t put down.