Brother Ced Buckley is the Civil War’s Father Brown

        Welcome, Ced Buckley fans! It’s springtime in the Valley of Virginia; a time of mountain shadows and valley shade and my latest novel, Burning Rage, is now available.

A Map of Kilpatrick’s Campaign to Richmond in 1864, including an incomplete rendition of Dahlgren’s Raid route. Dahlgren crossed the Mattaponi and was ambushed at Walkerton.

       It follows Soldiers Just Like You, which came out in 2010. Soldiers is based on the true story of the trial of captured members of the 54^th Massachusetts Infantry.

       The 54^th of course was a famous regiment of black soldiers who stormed Battery Wagner, near Charleston in 1863. Their assault there was made famous to modern audiences in the movie Glory, which starred Denzel Washington. Soldiers Just Like You told the story that Glory never got around to. Some sixty members of the 54^th were captured in the battle. Later the state of South Carolina put them on trial, asserting that they are not soldiers but are slaves in rebellion, a charge that carries the death penalty. The defense counsel, a local attorney named Nelson Mitchell, sought to clarify that the men were not slaves, but Union soldiers due all the rights of other prisoners of war. Mitchell, a long forgotten hero, was assisted in the case by a local Confederate officer named Edward McCrady, a historical fact so hard to believe that I could not have made it up.

       If a Civil War courtroom drama interests you, please read Soldiers Just Like You where you will be introduced to Ced Buckley, who testifies at the trial. And watch Glory. It is a fine motion picture even though the Union army attack as portrayed proceeds in the wrong direction along the beach! But I digress.

       Not quite a sequel to the Soldiers book, Burning Rage finds Cedric Buckley back in South Carolina, this time in Columbia. Buckley, a former Confederate soldier who lost a leg in the Charleston campaign, has left the army and taken vows as a Benedictine monk. He also has developed a knack for crime detection.

       In early 1865, Columbia fell to the onslaught of three Union armies commanded by the infamous William T. Sherman. When Union cavalryman Tupper Long finds the horribly mutilated corpses of a Kentucky regiment, he knows who did it and why. But Long doesn’t know the whole story. To see justice done, General Sherman convenes a court and turns to the peg-legged monk, Ced Buckley. Brother Buckley’s investigation follows a bloody trail of senseless murders, reforms a trans-Atlantic slaver and tracks a runaway train across three states. Along the way the humble Benedictine brother tramples out a vintage of atrocity and vengeance and reveals a treacherous plan to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

       Burning Rage is the first installment of the Ced Buckley Civil War Mystery series. Buckley is the war’s answer to Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton’s Catholic priest detective, a character who “hears men's real sins and is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil.”  Like Father Brown, Buckley is “characteristically humble, and is usually rather quiet, but when he does talk, he almost always says something profound.”

       As a Civil War sleuth who served in the Southern army, Buckley knows the horrors of the war; he is haunted by his own experience as a soldier. As the conflict moves toward its end, Buckley can see that it has changed the character of his beloved South; that the war’s outcome will make his homeland an angry, vengeful place. The war’s atrocities, its secret war as Buckley calls it, has set in motion a cycle of revenge that will not end with the fighting between armies.

       Burning Rage is a fast-paced adventure that opens with a retelling of Dahlgren’s Raid, one of the war’s most controversial engagements. The failed 1864 cavalry raid on Richmond outraged many in the South when mysterious papers found on the body of the raid's commanding officer, Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, revealed that one of the mission’s objectives was to assassinate Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet. Union leaders denied the charges, but the affair was an example of the treacherous secret war that spawned various acts of atrocity and revenge on both sides.

       I hope you enjoy Burning Rage, the first Ced Buckley Civil War mystery, as much as I enjoyed writing it. It is available at Amazon.com as a paperback or in Kindle format.

Kelly J. O’Grady

April, 2015