War Drums: A Novel
Livia Hallam with James Reasoner
The second book in the Palmetto Trilogy picks up where Call to Arms left off, as Allard Tyler and Barnaby Yorke limp into Nassau with their heavily damaged ship, the Ghost. Nassau is a new, exotic world for Allard, and the island is rife with intrigue that is not limited to the civil war in America. The danger, however, is more than mortal as Allard spurns the romantic advances of the bewitching, beautiful daughter of the island's governor. When their vessel is seaworthy again, Allard and Captain Yorke resume preying on Union merchant shipping on the return voyage to Charleston. Once there, Allard honors his promise to join his father's shipbuilding business in order to marry Diana Pinckston, the woman he loves.
Meanwhile, Allard's friend Robert rises to company command in the Hampton Legion and participates in the series of battles that comprise the Peninsula Campaign. That fall his brother, Cam, enrolls at the Citadel, where the charm of the city is enhanced by Allard's sister, Lucinda, with whom he has more than a passing acquaintance. Their mutual weakness for other leads to marriage. Lucinda, however, cunningly convinced Robert, who is home on a short leave, to do the noble thing when he fears that Cam's life is in danger. News of the impending marriage turns Jacqueline Lockhart, the woman Robert loves, against him, and he finds the battlefield more attractive than his soon-to-be-wife. Robert returns to duty as the Confederate army marches into Maryland, and after the battle of South Mountain and Antietam, he questions what he is fighting for on the long march back to Virginia and the ensuing battle of Fredericksburg.
As armies maneuver and ships roam the seas, Allard clashes with his father in the running of the family shipyard. Discouraged, with his wife distracted by her parents' dissolving marriage, Allard finds a way to go to sea once more with Barnaby Yorke. But it is a fateful voyage that climaxes in Nassau, where mayhem and death and indiscretions combine in a harrowing struggle for life and for hope.
| LIVIA HALLAM is a history researcher and writer known for her romantic fiction as Elizabeth Hallam. |
| JAMES REASONER is a veteran writer of historical fiction. Author of the Walker Texas Ranger books, he has written several volumes in the Wagons West series, a frontier trilogy set in the years before the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the ten-volume The Civil War Battle Series. Reasoner lives near Azle, Texas. |
$18.95, Paperback
ISBN-10: 1-58182-573-0 (Paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-58182-573-2 (Paperback)
Paperback Currently Available
