Summon the Angels

Kentucky 1871For Confederate cavalryman Francis "Marion" Allender the late War of Rebellion has never truly ended. He still identifies as a member of Morgan's Raiders, the guerilla band headed by the legendary Kentucky general. He is greeted with warmth and adulation by some, with loathing and suspicion from the rest--depending upon their political views--and it seeps into every aspect of his life.

As a new decade dawns, there's a dangerous battle that veterans from both sides will be forced to fight. A battle with no clear objectives, strategies, or marching orders. A battle without even a clearly defined enemy. In Marion's case, his enemy often feels uncomfortably close--his cousin Eliza and her Yankee husband, Corporal Jesse J. Cook. Jesse is a staunch Republican to Marion's Democrat, and Eliza (though blood), harbors a strangely personal vendetta.

Marion and Jesse are thrust together by circumstance and should pool their considerable talents and resolve for the sake of the family. But can they?

Danger lurks everywhere. In the dark, from the Ku-Klux-Klan. In the halls of power at the hands of corrupt politicians. In the meeting rooms of opposing veterans' organizations. In the teeming ghettos of immigrants. And amid a financial panic with its shuttered businesses, failed banks, collapsing farm prices, bankrupt railroads, low wages, joblessness, and breadlines. And underlying it all looms the question of how to assimilate the freed black man into American society.

It was not what soldiers expected after marching home. They wanted only to expand their businesses, grow their farms, love a good woman, father babies, ride to hounds or bet on horses, shoot, hunt, fish, play cards, and raise a glass to the nation's second century and its prosperity.

They did not expect, ever again, to seek the better angels of their nature.