On the morning of April 6, 1862, a Confederate army came out of the woods at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, and by nightfall more Americans had fallen than in all of the nation’s previous wars combined. Two days at Shiloh produced roughly 23,000 casualties. The country had told itself the war would be short. Shiloh ended that story.

William Tecumseh Sherman was in the middle of it. He had a horse killed under him, took a bullet through the hand, wrapped it in a handkerchief without dismounting, and kept riding his crumbling line—the most visible man on that part of the field, and he knew it, and he didn’t care. There were things to do, and dying would have to wait its turn.

That’s where my novel Howl opens: with a Confederate sniper braced in the fork of an oak, fifty yards away, aimed directly at Sherman. And with a frontier marksman named Elias Mobb, who doesn’t see the rifle—he sees a branch move half an inch in a way that doesn’t match the wind. On the frontier, you learned to see that or you died.

What Mobb does in the next fraction of a second creates a debt Sherman never speaks of, because speaking it would reduce it to language. That debt is the engine of the whole book.

I’ve walked Shiloh. If you’ve read my Duty, Honor, Country trilogy, you know it ends on the first night of that battle. Howl picks up the war from there, with different characters, and follows it to a much darker place.

Howl: WT Sherman’s Monster Hunters is available on Amazon. https://amzn.to/40WYgfJ