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A SEPARATE COUNTRY by Robert Hicks

A SEPARATE COUNTRY

by Robert Hicks

Pub Date: Sept. 23rd, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-58164-6
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

A tale of mixed-up foolscap, dark secrets, a dwarf and a wharf.

Tennessee-based Hicks, who debuted with a Civil War novel (The Widow of the South, 2005), ventures here into Reconstruction-era New Orleans. His hero is real-life Confederate warrior John Bell Hood (for whom the Texas fort is named), who settled after the Cause was Lost in New Orleans, where he had 11 children and otherwise kept busy. In Hicks’ tense and tasty account, one of Bell’s occupations is fending off the plague of unwanted characters who seek in one way or another to capitalize on his wartime renown. One is a mysterious chap named Sebastien Lemerle, a companion at arms from antebellum days. “In Texas I was young,” Hood remembers. “I wanted to fight. I wanted to fight Comanche. Sebastien Lemerle and his squad came with me.” For his sins, Hood gets his wish, and plenty more fights to boot. Somewhere along the way he also earns the continued attentions of Lemerle, who comes sniffing around Hood’s door all these years after the Civil War has ended. Not far behind is a “little man” named Rintrah who has his fingers in many a pie, as well as a priest decidedly not on priestly business and a few assorted members of the proto-KKK, to say nothing of the foppish Beauregard, gone from Civil War hero to New Orleans wheeler-dealer and publisher, in whose hands is a manuscript of Hood’s that Hood does not wish to be there. Thus the plot thickens, and Hicks spins a taut tale, told in many voices, of tangled webs, vengeance and other unfinished business.

Expertly written, with plenty of unexpected twists—a pleasure for Civil War buffs, but also for fans of literary mysteries.