AN EX-UNION SOLDIER ATTEMPTS TO SOLVE A MURDER AS POST CIVIL WAR DIVISIONS THREATEN TO TEAR A COMMUNITY APART "Hal Reames walks the reader back into the heart of the American Civil War, let by his amiable ex-slave raconteur, Bernard, who knows the heart is a "more personal organ." "-Michael Wolfe, author of the Hadj, Invisible Weapons and The Conversion of Henry IV. Thomas, a "free-thinking" ex-union soldier from Kansas migrates west and is building a schoolhouse for a friend"s sister. A wagon train brings Amos, a former rebel who is now pastor to Texan Baptists. The murder of a child threatens to tear the town in two; and northerner and southerner, believer and non-believer, must form a partnership to hold it together. To prove poisoning and explain the killer"s apparent ability to be in two places at once, the evidence-seeking skeptic must undertake a quest to Denver. An eccentric chemist in Central City will first teach him the Marsh Test for arsenic and then warn him that the...