FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

NEW  NONFICTION EXPLORES SECRET LIFE OF EXPLORER MERIWETHER LEWIS

Tony L. Turnbow has announced the upcoming release of his new book,  Jefferson’s Spy: The Secret Life of Meriwether Lewis. 

Who killed Meriwether Lewis is one of the oldest unsolved American mysteries.  Three years after co-leading the Lewis and Clark Expedition across the North American continent, the 35-year-old died suddenly on the Natchez Trace, a road so dangerous that travelers called it “The Devil’s Backbone.”

Federal officers in the area declared that the explorer took his own life, yet historians have debated the cause of his death for more than two centuries. Lewis’s body suffered multiple gunshot and knife wounds.

This first volume of a two-volume series tells the story of how Thomas Jefferson became a mentor  for  the young Virginian farm boy, harnessing Lewis’s love of exploration and danger for “secret service,” as official spying was known in the day.  Lewis and Clark became part of a select group that the government used for clandestine missions.

Turnbow describes the powerful interests in the new nation that created divided and fluid loyalties. Spies were everywhere.  Men in Jefferson’s position found it useful to engage spies and agents for their own purposes. The explorer found himself entangled in shadowy networks of double-agents, scoundrels, and highway robbers on the southwestern frontier as he worked to perform Jefferson’s mission to extend the nation’s boundaries to the Pacific and Rio Grande.  In that role, Lewis also became a threat to the most powerful and despicable double-agent in American history.

Turnbow, a lawyer in Franklin, Tennessee, has studied Lewis’s death for more than 40 years.  He had an opportunity to serve on an official coroner’s inquest jury convened in 1996 to determine whether Lewis died from suspicious circumstances and whether his body should be exhumed for further examination.

As the United States takes stock of its 250-year story, Jefferson’s Spy: The Secret Life of Meriwether Lewis examines the secret role  Lewis played in creating the nation Americans enjoy today.  Whether  Meriwether Lewis sacrificed his life in that mission or whether the obstacles he faced overwhelmed him may be clearer through this fresh look at  Lewis’s relationship with his mentor, Thomas Jefferson, and the extraordinary American life Jefferson selected Lewis to live.

Jefferson’s Spy will be available for purchase online and through traditional bookstores by order on January 24.

For more information:

Tony L. Turnbow, tturnbow@tonyturnbowlaw.com