She could never be certain which black-banded envelope held the truth.
Before there were birth announcements there were death announcements, delivered on special mourning stationery — note paper, letter sheets, and envelopes, all edged in a grieving band of black. Throughout the year, M. Warner received nearly a dozen such notices, recounting the deaths, under varying circumstances, of the same men: Secret Service agents Argent and Merritt, men who were little more than strangers to her. All the notices seem to come from different people, but Warner suspects otherwise, and launches an oblique investigation to discover the true culprit. Her investigation, however, draws in the very men who are reported dead — from drowning to burning to murder, on trains and steamboats, in flood and fire. The agents’ own separate investigation — into a shadowy criminal mastermind — may hold the answer to Warner’s search. M, at first indifferent to the fates of the men, becomes increasingly interested in their welfare as the black-banded envelopes pile up in the middle drawer of her father’s desk, tied together with a faded red ribbon. Through these death notices and other correspondence — including letters from Argent and Merritt themselves — M is able to follow the men as they travel along the Eastern seaboard, through the Midwest, across the Mississippi, and into the deepest South, working the cases of the Secret Service. Though each death announcement corresponds with the work and travel of Merritt and Argent, M could never be certain which black-banded envelope held the truth. The Black-Banded Envelope intertwines true Secret Service investigations with historical disasters in this latest installment of the M. Warner Annals.