In 1908, a brilliant American battleship gun designer dies in a sensational apparent suicide. The man's grief-stricken daughter turns to the legendary Van Dorn Detective Agency to clear her father's name. Van Dorn puts his chief investigator on the case, and Isaac Bell soon realizes that the clues point not to suicide but to murder.

Investigating a series of attacks on the Southern Pacific Railroad's Cascades express lines, Detective Bell learns of the existence of an elusive saboteur who recruits and murders his own accomplices while engineering schemes of maximum havoc.

In this book with rhyming text, the dream train pulls into the station and all the different cars are loaded by the animal workers, each with the appropriate cargo.

"The snow is coming down faster than train crews can clear the tracks. In a tiny town in the Cascade Mountains, Janie Pryor--and the other passengers trapped on the Seattle Express train--wait for the horrific blizzard to end. One day passes, then two, three... six days. Secretly, Janie doesn't mind being stuck on the mountain. She's safe from the brutal gangster chasing after her. And so far, nobody on the train knows about the stolen jewels Janie...