Author: Eric Wieman

Address: 731 Middle Way Louisville, KY, 40206

Phone: 502-552-6026

Category: Novella

Title: Without The Wind

Word Count 22,372

Synopsis

Following the Spanish execution of the captain and officers of the American ship the Virginius, caught smuggling weapons to Cuban rebels in 1873, the United States found itself on the edge of a new war. Having sold all its own ironclad warships to ease its debts, America could not afford to be dragged into a costly conflict with Spain. In the wake of those events, Without the Wind, traces the path of the inglorious veteran and traitor James Phobetor as he is inducted into the services of Colonel Fletcher Davis. Now presiding over the Magnolia plantation south of New Orleans, Davis is charged with seizing the last surviving ironclad from the gun runner Lucius Cephus, to prevent any further Spanish agitation. In the decaying world of postbellum Louisiana, Davis needs an edge to carve out a piece of the deal for himself. Across the river, in the town of Pointe à la Hache, he knows just the man, James Phobetor. An extraordinary picture of the South unfolds, exposing the ruins and the cost — human and physical as Phobetor faces the corruption of his enemies in the bottomless world of Plaquemines Parish.  Caught between the flames of two wars, one rising and one burning out, Without the Wind is an eerie and brutal slice of the Reconstruction, and the battle for money, power, and redemption along the lower Mississippi.