From his deathbed in 1900, John Bingham, the prosecutor of the John Wilkes Booth conspirators, reveals there was a deeper secret to the Lincoln assassination, but takes that secret to his grave, fearing the truth could threaten the republic.
Obsessed by those deathbed statements, Jamie Fraser, an Ohio country doctor, sets out to find the truth and joins forces with Speed Cook, a wary African-American, the last black man to play baseball in the big leagues.
Navigating the racial chasm between them, they pursue the elusive clues of what lay behind the Lincoln murder in Ford's Theater in April 1865. The unlikely duo cheats death in a race riot, on a steamboat, and on a darkened path in the nation's capital where they discover the appalling truth of Mr. Bingham's secret-and a deception thrust upon an entire nation.
