Nicholas Kinsey
'There was no end to the sounds in the camp. The shouts of the guards, Freddy’s voice as he recited his favorite poems, the sound of rotten meat hissing and popping over makeshift fires, the banging of pots and pans in the camp kitchen, the wind blowing off Lake Michigan, the dull clank of shovels and pickaxes as men dug graves, the bird song during funerals and the pitter-patter of the rain on the window sill as I read the bible I carry in my vest pocket.'From the bestselling author of White Slaves: 15 Years a Barbary Slave, An Absolute Secret, Shipwrecked Lives, Remembrance Man, and Playing Rudolf Hess comes this brilliantly imagined novel about a great American patriot: Lt. Bennett H. Young. It tells the story of the Confederate raider from his escape from the Camp Douglas prison camp in Chicago in 1864 to his raid on St. Albans, Vermont, his extradition trial in Montreal, to his race across the snowy landscape of Quebec in winter with girlfriend Eliza, his escape from a deadly killer with the help of a French-Canadian wild child named Iris, and his pursuit of justice in a Louisville courtroom against the Ku Klux Klan for the ex-slave George Dinning. 'A TOUCHING FATHER-DAUGHTER DUO.'Kinsey’s richly evocative novel takes the reader back to the Civil War and the last years of the 19th century. It takes us on a blockade runner with Rose Greenhow, the famous Washington socialite and spy, pursued by Yankee ships into the Cape Fear River. It shines a light on the Civil War amputees and their struggle to make a new life for themselves. It follows young Iris as she trains to become a nurse at America’s first school of nursing at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston, witnesses the Great Fire of Boston, and volunteers to go to Hickman, Kentucky as a nurse to help the war criminal, Dr. Luke Blackburn, in his fight against the terrible yellow fever scourge. It tells a remarkable story of race and the fight for justice during the Jim Crow era.
