Flames of Anarchy
A bomb explodes outside Union Station in Washington, DC, missing by minutes the train carrying President Theodore Roosevelt and New York Senator Jason Ellis and their wives. Less than a month later, a fire rages through a restaurant where Ellis and a newly elected senator from the Midwest are scheduled to speak. A few days afterward, the CEO of Union Life Insurance Company, a friend and beneficiary of Ellis’s personal business trust fund, is shot to death at a workers’ rally demanding unionization. A coincidence? Or a series of targeted attacks?
Flames of Anarchy is the latest work by Borrowman, whose 2017 work of historical nonfiction, Compassionate Soldier, received the George Washington Medal of Honor from the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge.
The novel is set in the early 1900s when anarchists mounted attacks on US and European leaders, including President William McKinley, Tsar Alexander II, and Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It touches on the attitudes that fuel anarchists’ antagonisms and grievances as well as the machinations that fill capitalists’ pocketbooks and the need for a federal investigative force—the FBI. The book adds small bits of historical color with cameo appearances by leaders of finance and foreign governments, social niceties of the time, and the first samplings of products such as Pepsi Cola.
The story unfolds in a series of vignettes, some of which do little to advance the plot or add tension. Characters spend a lot of time explaining instead of leading readers along so they can see things for themselves, form their own suspicions about a possible covert operative, or worry about what may happen around the next corner. An intriguing setup with some flashes along the way, but no real ignition.
