The Waterworks
In the New York of 1871, with Tweed's ring still collecting, a newspaper editor loses his best freelance, a young man who had insisted he saw his dead father riding a white omnibus up Broadway. The editor and a plain-spoken police captain start pulling at the thread, which runs through an orphan asylum, a distributing reservoir and the accounts of men who died rich. Doctorow wrote it in a deliberately nineteenth-century register, the closest he came to a gothic mystery at novel length.
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