Soon after the Civil War, three Ohio-born and raised US Presidents in a row (Grant, Hayes, and Garfield) hid most of our country's top-secret facilities along a mysterious route they called "The Railroad to Nowhere."

​

This lonely rail, officially the Camp Chase Railroad, cut straight across Sullivant's Hill (today's Hilltop). Hundreds of supporting facts are linked at the bottom of this page.

​

​​The Spies of Sullivant's Hill is a clever, rapid-fire, gadget-packed, often comical superspy series based on one of those top-secret operations, codenamed ORPHAN. According to the Elders from Sullivant's Hill, ORPHAN was America's first undercover espionage agency. The first novel (Season One) of this series, is The Southern Cross.

​​

​The Southern Cross introduces ORPHAN's first two superspies, the eccentric badboy Colin McLaughlin and the perpetually hungry Lemont Freeman, who happens to be Aunt Jemima's larger-than-life son. Together, they take on the world's most self-absorbed madman, Southern tycoon Tyberious Maximus Cross.

​

​​​​At fourteen, Cross inherited his father's international shipping empire; 25 years later (1882), his henchmen stole 17 notebooks from the newly arrived Nicola Tesla. By 1885, Cross's engineers and slaves at his industrial complexes in Cuba had turned Nicky's notes into a vast arsenal of Earth's first radio-wave controlled weapons. ​

​​

​On May 1, 1885, Cross's new Confederacy was about to win the Civil War instantly, 20 years after the first version lost it.

​

​However, after being robbed, Nicola Tesla became ORPHAN'S Tech Master, cranking out wild weapons, spy gadgets, and insane speed machines to hopefully help McLaughlin and Freeman save America from the Southerner named Cross.

​

The Southern Cross (Season One) is the first of five ORPHAN agent novels that author Craig Wise began writing in 2016.

 

Wise envisions each book as one season from an epic TV series, The Spies of Sullivant's Hill.

​