Coming November 15, 2025
The Shadow Appears
A tale of vengeance, honor, and the search for redemption in the ashes of war.
Confederate Captain Robert Hester, one of Major Mosby’s Rangers, awakens in a Richmond hospital in March of 1865. He has been there for three months, recovering from a gunshot he received during an attack on Yankee raiders in Northern Virginia. As with Mosby and all of his men, the Union Army considers him an outlaw and he has a bounty on his head. As Petersburg falls to the Yankees and Richmond’s fall is inevitable, Mosby, concerned that Hester could be taken from the hospital and hanged, convinces General Lee to have Hester assigned to assist in guarding President Davis and the Confederate Treasury as Davis and the Treasury evacuate Richmond.
While riding a reconnaissance mission with his Sergeant Josiah Turley, Captain Hester decides to visit his family before leaving with Davis. When they near his family home, they hear gunfire and then watch as Yankee bummers kill his family and burn his home. He sees his father, his sister, his bride-to-be and Aunt Callie (the Black woman who raised him and his sister after their mother’s death) all killed by the bummers.
Fueled by grief and rage, Hester vows vengeance. He and Turley ride through North Carolina where Turley finds and loses a ready-made family to settle down with. Their journey takes them through South Carolina and Georgia in a vain attempt to reunite with Davis, witnessing the destruction and devastation. When they hear that Davis has been captured, they set their sights on Texas where they hope to join with General Kirby Smith’s Trans-Mississippi army. Together, Hester and Turley navigate a war- torn South and confront loss, moral ambiguity, and the cost of an unrelenting thirst for revenge.
In Texas, after Kirby Smith surrenders, Captain Hester turns his horse toward Mexico to join Jo Shelby in an attempt to rebuild a Southern army and return to continue to fight for the Lost Cause.
The War had taken everything he valued from him. He had lost his home. His family. His cause. And his only reason for living now was vengeance. All he had left were his horses, his guns and his sense of honor. So, he pointed his horse toward war-torn Mexico. To find his old life. Or a new one. Or to die with neither. He didn’t think he cared which of the three he found.
