Ocean Park, Washington, author Peter Adams Young has written a murder mystery about a group of Gettysburg reenactors.

Long Beach Peninsula author Peter Adams Young launches a promising new murder mystery series with “Another Death at Gettysburg.”

The author, a U.S. Navy veteran, brings back Mike Davis, the protagonist in his 2021 award-winning debut novel, “One Hundred Stingers.”

That book was set during the Vietnam War, but this new book occurs more than a quarter century later. Long since retired from the service, Mike has just been wooed away from his work at an Oregon college, and is settling in as a history professor on the faculty at Gettysburg College. His wife Linh Anh — “Annie” — has accompanied him. She has a master’s degree in library science and hopes to secure a position in the college’s library.

This week’s book

This week’s book

“Another Death at Gettysburg” by Peter Adams Young

Shoalwater Press — 426 pp — $14.96

But as these new arrivals find out, people who live in Gettysburg are bound to be pulled into one of the many organizations and activities surrounding the town’s significance as a Civil War battleground.

Annie is quickly tapped for a massive volunteer project to catalog the holdings of the Gettysburg National Military Park Library.

Mike is recruited to “fight” as a Union soldier in the annual reenactment of Pickett’s Charge — which is perfect because a longtime focus of his scholarship has been George Pickett, the U.S. military officer who switched over to fight for the Confederacy when the Civil War broke out.

But in the course of the reenacted battle, things go tragically awry when the popular lead of one of the volunteer infantry companies is shot and killed.

Reenactors are strictly prohibited from using live ammunition, so an investigation ensues. Complications arise when it’s discovered that the man’s death may be connected to a corrupt land grab attempt that, if successful, would impact the integrity of the area’s historical landscape.

In every chapter, Young presents a mosaic of many different viewpoints, as various players in the plot move forward with their investigation — or obfuscation — of the case.

Clearly, the author has conducted meticulous research. The police procedural scenes are packed with details, as are the reenactment sequences, and the scenes where Annie is performing her work in the library collections.

Organizationally, however, this mosaic approach requires intensive effort on the part of the reader to keep track of who is doing what.

The bulk of the story takes place in 1997, and the author gets a few details from that time wrong. When he introduces a Hood Canal-based lesbian couple as married, for example, he anticipates the legalization of gay marriage in Washington State in over a decade.

More subjectively, it could just be this reviewer’s jaded 2024 perspective, but did grown, professional women in the late 20th century giggle as much as the story’s female characters seemed prone to do in this story?

Those criticisms aside, there are plot twists, action, chicanery, sleuthing and American history galore in “Another Death at Gettysburg.” And Young is already thinking up another contemporary battlefield mystery set at Antietam.