A story never told, this riveting novel is set in the Antebellum era of the old south. It tells of the dark and slimy underbelly of the South’s greatest dynasties, the southern plantations.

 

Born into devastating poverty, Samuel Elywn Biggs learns money is the only way to escape the slums of Petersburg and the wrecked family into which he was born. By chance, he becomes a gambler and with that, he gains  huge wealth. From an old man, dying from consumption, he has won a large tract of undeveloped land in North Carolina.  He leaves his home in Virginia and heads toward his future.

With  the prospect of a new life so far removed from the poverty he has known, he gathers his accumulated wealth, and sets out to establish his plantation, complete with the huge, white mansion he has long dreamed of.

Upon arrival, he quickly learns his neighbor, Hesper Griffen, owner of the plantation adjacent to and north of his new holdings is  mentally ill, and an alcoholic. And one sickness feeds the other. For decades Griffen has used the abandoned land Sam now intends to develop, as if it were his own. Determined to drive Sam away, he challenges him at every turn, and with each succeeding confrontation, his violent methods increase. Tyranny has always been the way he has controlled his other neighbors and they have always cowered to him. He sends his minions to create havoc for Sam’s plans.

Griffen is startled as Sam dumps onto his front lawn, the bodies of one man, the man’s brother, only barely alive, but with shards of broken fingers sticking through a blood soaked towel as he bleeds out, and those of two slave tracking dogs. Griffen learns his heavy-handed violence has been replaced by that of a man who could not and would not cower before him. He is embarrassed by the new-comer who is willing to fight back with his own brand of fierce and extreme retaliation.  So Griffen ratchets up his attacks—determined to better his new enemy. Thus a war erupts between the two men.

Sam’s neighbor to the south, Emmett Detwyler, also a wealthy plantation owner, befriends Sam. And with an agenda of his own, becomes Sam’s mentor. With Emmett, lives a mysterious and beautiful young woman. Rose is not Emmett’s wife, nor is she his daughter. The two are devoted to one another. Who is this woman and why does she live with Emmett? Sam wonders. Soon, he and Rose fall in love and plan to marry, but Rose continually forestalls the wedding.

There are secrets that Sam must be told. Secrets that hint of incest and sexual aberrations. And there are wrongs which must be righted.

The author, Dwight V. Murray was born and raised in the part of North Carolina in which this riveting family saga is set. As a youngster, he found a badly rusted sword in a nearby woods. All that remained was the guard, the tang and four inches of the original blade, the balance of which was missing and lost forever. He was told by his history teacher it dated from the Civil war. He has been on a journey since that day. He has held fast to an abiding interest in all things Antebellum and all things involving the American Civil War.

 

His interest in that long gone era has taken him to the great National and Memorial Battlefields and to the bloodied fields of smaller skirmishes. He has walked across those hallowed fields of destruction. He has heard the weaponry of war sing its dreadful songs. He has felt the loss of loved ones, the pain of the wounded man, laying alone, cast aside much like the broken weapons of war that they were. He has seen their suffering. He has seen their dying. Those excursions imparted upon him a desire to tell the stories of those Americans, the warriors, and the men and women who stayed at home and prayed for their loved ones. There will never be enough said about the heroism of the warriors—those Yankees, and those Rebels. His stories are based upon legends and part-truths. But oddly, the one thing each story has in common is, in reality—they are all true. Every bad and unimaginable thing was committed during those terrible four years, thence, even the legends and the half truths must, in fact—be the truth—such was the magnitude of the American Civil War.

 

The icon of the deep south, the huge multi-columned mansions are still plentiful in the area in which he was born and lived. The occasional artifact of a war which nearly divided the United States of America can still be found. And everywhere, there are the ghostly reminders of that long ago time.