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Reviewed by C.R. Hurst for Readers' Favorite
I love reading about history’s mysteries, especially those that connect seemingly disparate people and events from the past. That’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed Death of an Assassin: The True Story of the German Murderer Who Died Defending Robert E. Lee by Ann Marie Ackermann so much. In this book, the author tells the true story of the unsolved murder of the mayor of a small town in Germany, which takes the reader from the scene of the crime and its investigation to the flight of the murderer to America. There he joined a regiment of German soldiers who fought under a young captain named Robert E. Lee during the Mexican-American War, a war that would eventually add California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Colorado to the westward expansion of the United States.
Yet I enjoyed reading Death of an Assassin for more reasons than simply its subject matter. Ann Marie Ackermann manages to do what few historians can do well and that is to write engagingly and fluidly without neglecting the sound research and evidence needed for historical nonfiction. She stitches together the pieces of evidence to create a crazy quilt of historical happenstance that kept me fascinated until its conclusion. To further add to my enjoyment, I later learned that one of the crucial characters in the story, August Frederick Rupp, who is falsely accused of the mayor’s murder and holds the key to its resolution, shares the same last name as one of my distant ancestors, Ulrich Rupp of Lancaster, PA. Truth can indeed be stranger than fiction!
