Billy fell in love with a beautiful Irish girl working for a wealthy Park Avenue family. Billy wanted to marry Eva, but then she went back to Ireland. Eva died of pneumonia. Billy never got over it. Billy began courting Maeve not long after, but for the rest of their lives, he, she and Dennis shared a hidden, twisted grief.

A literary mystery set amongst the religious communities of New York City - which deepens into addressing the great moral questions of the last century.

A soldier wounded in the Civil War, Inman begins the journey home to Cold Mountain, and to Ada, the woman he loved before the war began. As he attempts to make his way across the mountains, Ada struggles to make a living from the land her once-wealthy father left when he died. Neither knows if the other is still alive.

This is the interweaving story of four men. On the Union side, Joshua Chamberlain and Winfield Scott Hancock both became heroes at Gettysburg. For the Confederacy, Thomas Stonewall Jackson, a failure at the Virginia Miltiary Academy, and Robert E. Lee, one of the greatest leaders of all time.

On June 15, 1863, Robert Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia slips across the Potomac to begin the invasion of the North. His army is 70,000 strong but mostly unpaid and self-equipped. It has won nearly every battle it has fought. Lee knows a letter has been written, a letter offering peace.