Into the Suffering City

New historical crime thriller explores Baltimore through the eyes of a young female doctor on the autism spectrum.

Into the Suffering City, by Bill LeFurgy, centers on a murder investigation set against the backdrop of a historically accurate depiction of city life a century ago.

It’s 1909 and Baltimore is jumping with danger and excitement. Cars, cocaine, ragtime music, and moving pictures are new. But some things are as old as the city itself: murder, corruption, and the painful divisions of race, class, and gender. 

Dr. Sarah Kennecott is brilliant and on the autism spectrum—a trait that is unidentified and unappreciated at the time. And after getting fired for probing the death of a showgirl, she refuses to back down. Although dealing with people is  hard, she works to get information from arrogant and abusive men while defying an effort to banish her to a horrifying insane asylum. 

Sarah forms an unlikely bond with Jack Harden, a down-on-his-luck private detective struggling with a condition similar to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from witnessing a wartime massacre overseas. Jack pushes the case into Baltimore’s seedy underworld, a vitally corrupt realm of saloons, brothels, and burlesque theaters. Along the way he’s got to deal with a murderous police detective and a moving pictures actress who is as deadly as she is beautiful. 

Into the Suffering City uses the actual historical circumstances of 1909 Baltimore, including virulent racism (including a law that prevents a people of mixed race from marrying a white person), rampant use of cocaine and other narcotics, and widespread, out in the open, prostitution. 

Into the Suffering City gives insight into the struggles a century ago of women, people of color, those with mental illness, those on the autism spectrum, and the great mass of people considered “lower class.”

The book also explores the newly emergent field of criminal forensics at a time when fingerprints and rigorous crime scene analysis were not routine police procedure.