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Book Reviews
"Ride With the Assassin"
A Book Review by Tony Ettwein
Many of us who have read about Abraham Lincoln can relate to the adage “truth is stranger than fiction.” The lives of Lincoln and people around him are chock-full of ironies and coincidences: Lincoln signing the Secret Service into law the day of his assassination; his Aunt Mary being first cousins with Dr. Samuel Mudd; Robert Lincoln spending his father’s final day on Earth with Booth’s secret fiancée, Lucy Hale. And on and on.
Ride With the Assassin by Megan L. Hardgrave (self-published, 2017, 120 pp.) is a fictional story that also feeds our history bug by sharing many real stories about people who made a difference in our nation during that eventful year of 1865, including some of those strange connections involving Lincoln.
Ride With the Assassin introduces an important new main character—a fictional one—who, on the evening of Good Friday 1865 suddenly finds himself helping a familiar figure in town, an actor who has quickly exited Ford’s Theatre with an injured leg. Mark is unaware of the atrocity the 26-year-old actor has committed and is very willing to help. We also find out that Mark has a special extrasensory gift, and that he also bears a resemblance to one of the actor’s conspirators in the terrible crime. These literary devices provide some additional adventure to the real story we all know well but is worth recounting from another perspective.
Following the initial getaway from Ford’s Theatre, Hardgrave guides us back a few days earlier in the same city, Washington, D.C., which is awash with celebration in the wake of Gen. Lee’s surrender to Gen. Grant, and the feeling of positive excitement that many, including Mark, Lincoln, and others surely felt . . . but a feeling that Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth didn’t share. Mark realizes early in the ride that the man he’s been trying to help took President Lincoln’s life, and is understandably shocked.
During Mark and Booth’s ride, we share their experiences, including real places and people Booth and accomplice David Herold saw, including the crossing of the Navy Yard Bridge and the stop at Surratt Tavern, right through to the final stop at Garrett’s tobacco barn near Port Royal, Virginia.
Author Hardgrave has been interested in history since her youth. She became particularly interested in Lincoln at age 8. On one bus ride home with her classmates, Hardgrave recalls reading a book about the events that took place following Lincoln’s assassination, and that although her classmates knew about Lincoln’s death, they didn’t know that a manhunt had taken place, or other history in the immediate aftermath of the assassination and the Civil War. A resident of Texas, Hardgrave has visited most of the
places where Lincoln lived and also visited parts of Booth’s escape route.
In addition to the tale well told, Hardgrave provides useful timelines and maps of Booth’s escape, as well as an afterword section that described what actually happened to some of the key figures in Lincoln’s life, including his family and people connected with the assassination.
Megan L. Hardgrave’s Ride With the Assassin is an engaging tale of Booth’s escape, as well as an adventure that provides the reader with satisfying doses of fact and fiction.
