The new Harrison Raines American Civil War mystery - a spy for the Union Army, with a brother fighting for the Confederate South. In eighteen months as part of famed detective Allan Pinkerton's Secret Service during the American Civil War, Harry Raines has repeatedly risked his own life and experienced unbelievable horrors. Sick of it, he resigns from the service and retires to the horse farm he inherited from his mother in the upper Potomac valley near Shepherdstown, Virginia. This idyll is quickly interrupted, however, when the local Presbyterian minister, a family friend, is found shot and hanged in lynch mob fashion. Harry's investigation of the murder is cut short by the arrival of Robert E. Lee's invading Army of Northern Virginia and the ensuing Battle of Antietam. Fought just across the river from Shepherdstown, it was the bloodiest single day of the war but a pivotal engagement that enabled Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
Acquitting himself well as a scout in the battle, Harry returns to his detective work, bedevilled by a continuing succession of murders of young Shepherdstown women who may or may not have been involved romantically with the slain pastor. The ultimate solution to the mystery not only lays bare the town's bitter divisions over slavery but proves to have the gravest possible national implications.