Tempting Skies

The Final Chapter in Award-Winning Beyond the Wood Series. Four decades after the Civil War, former Kentucky slave Victoria Richman has passed away. Among her belongings, her bereft family discovers a narrative she's written recounting the summer of 1864 in Virginia and the Nation's Capital. Mrs. Richman's manuscript describes a defining year, full of fury, sorrow, dread, hate, hope and love in the lives that intersect hers: Betsy Richman Henderson tries to escape once again her demoralizing dance with a still-scheming Lucius Walthrope, even as war's devastation trudges southward toward her Shenandoah Valley homestead. William Richman, at last a legally free man, painfully struggles to scrape away slavery's emotional scars and remnant self-doubt. Amidst inner disarray and outer humiliation, he battles for his place in a new social order of liberty framed in 19th Century racism. Victoria herself struggles to find meaning in her new life. Thoughtful and intelligent, she resists a mundane life far from the war and its shifting purpose as she lives and chronicles the dramatic climax of the "Beyond the Wood Series."