Path of Peril
In January 1947, Maurice Cooper Latta reveals information he witnessed and kept secret as the president’s secretary for 41 years: threats to the life of Theodore Roosevelt from anarchists Arthur Sitwell, assuming the alias Magnus Gustafsson, and Alberto Agresti, received while Roosevelt was in Panama in 1908.
Although the assassination scenarios in Path of Peril are wholly fictional, they are built from actual incidents: rumors about a bombing along the railroad tracks that would carry Roosevelt’s train through Lincoln, Illinois, in 1903, and threats to the president from the Chilean anarchist Jerome Kehl. (Theodore Roosevelt in actuality was wounded by an assassin’s bullet in Milwaukee in 1912.)
While the plans and actions of the would-be assassins are drivers of the book’s plot (and generate page-turning action), the novel offers much more: vivid details about the construction of the Panama Canal, including the desperate conditions for many of the workers and shady dealings and bid rigging among building supply contractors, as well as the actions of on-the-scene newspaper and magazine reporters, secret service agents and operatives, and medical personnel on the frontlines of recognizing and confronting the cause of yellow fever.
The result is a see-it-now type of experience that relives the past in the words of those who viewed it. Fascinating, informative, and thoroughly entertaining.
