The Saltworks at Saltville
A Novel of the Virginia Mountains

About this book:

In the shadows of the Appalachian ridges, the Confederacy's most vital lifeline isn't gold or gunpowder—it's salt. At Saltville, Virginia, three thousand men tend infernal furnaces day and night, boiling brine from ancient seas to preserve the meat that feeds Lee's army. Captain Thomas Vance, a Confederate engineer dispatched from Richmond, arrives to find the works failing: brine turning weak, timbers stripped bare, and the mountain men who know the earth's secrets answering to no flag.

Chief among them is Malcolm Cole, a borer who can read the rock by the bite of a drill bit. He stays for gold to buy his brother's freedom from a Yankee prison, not for the Cause. As Union cavalry mass in Kentucky and the valley's fragile loyalties fracture along every creek and ridge, Vance and Cole circle each other—one armed with transit and theory, the other with hard-won instinct and a mountain's grudges. Between them lies the red salt clay that could save the South or bury them both.

Rich with the grit of industrial war and the smell of woodsmoke and sulfur, *The Saltworks at Saltville* illuminates a forgotten front where the battle isn't won by flags on a map, but by keeping the kettles boiling one more day. For readers who love the engineering detail of *The Great Bridge* and the divided loyalties of *Cold Mountain*, this is Civil War fiction at its most visceral—where the next well sunk may decide whether an army fights or starves.