The Manhattan Well

In the winter of 1800, a young New York carpenter named Levi Weeks is arrested and charged with the murder of his fiancée, 22-year-old, Gulielma Sands. A couple of days earlier, Gulielma's remains had been pulled from the icy water of a well called The Manhattan Well and placed on lurid public display. Passions were aroused, pamphlets published, angry crowds gathered -- all the more so when those bitterest of political enemies, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, entered the picture as Levi's defense attorneys . In his new novel, "The Manhattan Well," author Stanley Cloud, a well-known journalist and non-fiction writer, uses these historical facts to set in motion a train of events that ends -- with tragic inevitability -- on a cliff near Weehawken, New Jersey, early in the morning of July 12, 1804, when Burr shoots and kills Hamilton in their famous duel. For centuries, historians have wondered and speculated about that duel, its immediate cause and what connection it had to Hamilton's and Burr's past battles and declining fortunes. In "The Manhattan Well," Stanley Cloud provides answers, skillfully weaving the elements of the story -- murder, political combat and financial deceit -- into a complex and dramatic tapestry that brings to life one of the most significant periods in American political history and some of its most fascinating and significant characters.