Post-Civil War Era Fiction

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Lace and Loyalty

Amidst the Gilded Age in America, a boyish horse-lover and an aging whore get summoned to a decaying estate in the Adirondack Mountains as possible long-lost relatives and potential heirs. While their fragile little-old-lady hostess stages a lively contest for the inheritance, the two young women eventually work out that no single thing about Haverlock Hall is what it seemed at first.

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Asa James

1875Vermont. Asa James hasn’t exactly sucked on a silver spoon. No one chooses to grow up on a rural poor farm, but a mixed-race orphan with Asa’s scarred face has little choice. Against the odds he has grown into a young man determined to be a naturalist and scientific thinker, in the vein of Charles Darwin. Unfortunately the people at the poor farm think he’s a dreamer and should be learning a trade.

Thrust alone into the wider world, he takes a tutor’s position at a mountaintop mansion. There, widow Caro Rockwell is glossy and sardonic, someone so far outside Asa’s experience that she could well be another species. Except he begins to glimpse the broken woman inside the shell. Amidst a series of eerie events, they form a friendship that grows into a sweet and tender sort of love.

His heart has what it wants. But then, from within the many dark recesses of Mansfield Hall, a shameful secret is discovered that will force Asa into making a terrible choice.

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Civil War Era Fiction

Malvina Frye

Sometimes a cranky Yankee schoolteacher is the only one for the job.

For Malvina Frye, a flinty spinster from Vermont, unraveling a mysterious tragedy conflicts with a pressing call to duty—kicking the backsides of schoolboys-turned-soldiers to get them to Gettysburg.  It’s Olive Kitteridge at the Civil War, taking names.

Malvina Frye long ago gave up on ever seeing her brother again. When he disappeared as a baby, the heart-rending loss also cost her family their farm and their standing in town. At the age of 34, Malvina is stubborn and embattled, teaching school to earn money to buy land again. She’s determined to restore the Fryes as respected farmers. When it comes to light that her brother is alive and serving in the Union Army, there’s a chance to inherit a valuable piece of land if she can find him in time.

All the many aspects of her mission to get justice for her brother and her family come into conflict with doing her part for the war—the greater meaning of which has only begun to sink in. Malvina needs to get home before her family gets gutted again. These Vermont schoolboys need to drag their exhausted bodies to Gettysburg to hold the line in a pivotal battle. None of these boys will quit while the schoolteacher’s still marching.

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House of Blue and Gray

Once a debutante with a head full of stories, India West has spent the last eighteen years raising an illegitimate daughter in an elegant wreck of a plantation house. India is content to ignore the Civil War, but her daughter Sadie has grown into a fiery abolitionist, thus endangering them both in pro-slavery Kentucky. Sadie has also, somehow, landed a proposal from a young man of a prominent family. For India, so long an outcast, Sadie’s engagement could mean a return to society.

But Sadie is not her mother’s daughter. She trades society for the battlefield, disguising herself as a boy to join the Union army. India sets out to find her daughter in Vicksburg, a city under siege, where she takes cover among the Rebels. When Sadie is taken prisoner, India marshals her talent as a storyteller to become a spy for the North. In this dangerous new position she finds a chance to help the Union win the battle—by provoking a Rebel surrender. Except it would require she finally choose a side. It would reveal her as a traitor. It would as good as sign Sadie’s execution order.

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