Fire in the Water follows the story of two decidedly different men traveling together to pay their respects to one of America’s most beloved presidents after our nation’s deadliest war. Its synopsis reads “Early in the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln shook Paddy Quinn's hand, grinned and winked at him, the war correspondent felt as if he'd been given a medal. At the end of the war, "Father Abraham" lies dead by an assassin's bullet, but Quinn's writing hand still feels that grip, "like warm iron," pulling him. He gets himself assigned to cover the President's burial in Springfield, Illinois for Harper’s Weekly, and boards the doomed steamboat Sultana to go up river and write Lincoln’s elegy.
Private Robbie Macombie, a deathly sick prisoner of war, always felt that he was soldiering not for "the Union," but for Abe Lincoln, who grew up just like him laboring in hardscrabble frontier Indiana. That sense of kinship makes him want to go to the funeral more than home, if he can stay alive long enough.
And so the two war-addled men, each one's strengths balancing the other's weaknesses, join like converging rivers in a life-current strong enough to carry them through the sudden horror of the worst maritime disaster in American history.
Prize-winning historical novelist James Alexander Thom, compassionately creates these two pilgrims as eyewitnesses of that tragedy. Both learn, as desperate men do, that Fate has wiser plans for them than their own.”
Everyone is invited to attend this exciting book signing at the Shawnee Prairie Preserve Nature Center just west of Greenville on State Route 502. For any questions, please call the center at (937) 548-0165.
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