Flying Crows - Tapa dura

In 1997, police discover a homeless old man in the Kansas City train station. "Birdie Carlucci" claims he has lived there since 1933, hiding out in the storeroom of a Harvey House restaurant. Kansas City cop Lieutenant Randy Benton decides to discover the truth behind Birdie's tale - and finds himself on a ride that leads ever backward into our country's bloodstained past.
Benton's investigation reveals the story of young Birdie, incarcerated in a brutal insane asylum where the preferred method of treatment is beating with a baseball bat. In that hopeless environment, though, he's befriended by another patient, Josh Lancaster, once dismissed as a lost cause but snatched back from the brink by a compassionate doctor. But what is the secret of Lancaster's involvement in an infamous Civil War encounter between Confederate bushwhackers and Union soldiers? And what truly happened after Birdie and Lancaster escaped from the asylum on the famous Flying Crow train?
As Benton returns to the present day, he wonders: How much of any of this really took place? What were the true public and private traumas of these two troubled men who can't forget what they've seen, or perhaps what they've merely imagined?

This is JIM LEHRER’s fourteenth novel. He is the executive editor/anchor of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS and lives in Washington, D.C. He and his novelist wife, Kate, have three daughters.