Not One Among Them Whole: A Novel of Gettysburg

The flies.The blood.The wounds.The soldiers.The surgeons.The embalmers. This is a steep descent into the insanity of battlefield surgery in 1863. Audacious. It is the summer of 1863, and the greatest battle ever fought on American soil is in full tilt. Southern Pennsylvania has become one great grinding stone and thousands of dead or dying are its grist. In this tilted landscape, reputations are made, careers are ruined, and men and women are driven to the brink in the wake of two armies intent on killing one another. Yet opportunity is everywhere... For the privates and officers who fight the battle, it's a kill or be killed world, with salvation or damnation just a bullet away... For the surgeons laboring over the many wounded, opportunity knocks at the bloody tables, where the price of a man's life is all too often an arm or a leg. The cost to the surgeons, however, will be even higher... For one undertaker in particular, the dead are a canvas, and his ability to make a body reflect the living individual is nothing short of uncanny. For Jupiter Jones, the burgeoning dead themselves are the opportunity... And finally, for one teenage former slave, alive only because his father had the courage to bury him, opportunity comes in the form of a ten-year-old boy with a creel and only one shoe, who may or may not be a ghost... In the summer of 1863, and humanity itself is under siege. What happens amid the carnage and human flotsam of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, will be unholy, unnerving, and all but unbearable, with only this certain: not one among them will escape unscathed. Here, for the living, hell is in session. And for the dead, it's the devil's own day. Consider yourself warned.