This suspenseful novel had me reading late into the night and I found it both compelling and horrifying. As he tracks down one particular young man in Indianapolis, the chain of command begins to seem off, and his investigations into the underground airlines get personal. His reasons for being in this line of work unfold over the course of the novel, but from the beginning it is clear the work disgusts and tortures him.

Victor works for the US Marshall Service tracking down runaways so they can be returned to their owners. Winters has taken the concept and imagined what would have happened if Lincoln had been assassinated before becoming President and Congress had reached an agreement which included several southern states maintaining their rights to own human beings. Winters, an Edgar award winner for The Last Policeman, has created a fully formed world in which greed interferes with humanity, power can corrupt, and, to the satisfaction of the reader, sometimes the good guys can still get somewhere even if they don’t fully win.The stories and tall tales of the underground railroad which helped thousands of enslaved people escape to the northern United States and Canada continue to fascinate and inspire artists today.

Free State citizens in the North don’t much like purchasing exported goods from companies earning money off the backs of slave labor. He’s been sent to steal company secrets that will scandalize one of the largest manufacturers in the Hard Four. As he travels under the arcane rules set up for black people in the Hard Four, he is under surveillance by Bridge, a priest, two cops and a henchman. A few chapters later we learn that Victor himself is an escaped slave, caught in a web of malfeasance and must risk his so called freedom by going back to the south. This simple setup becomes complicated within a few chapters, as the layered world of slave trade, import/export laws from north and south, and double agents enter the playbook. The book opens in Indiana, where Victor, a slave hunter, is working for a government agent named Bridge, and is searching for a slave named Jackdaw. The “Airlines” of the title refers to an escaped slave's safe passage out of the US. The civil war never happened and Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Carolina are slave states known as the Hard Four. Part thriller, part alternative history, and fully engaging, Underground Airlines is set in the present. Not to be confused with Colson Whitehead’s inventive novel, Underground Railroad is Ben H.

Underground airlines review