It is November of 1864, Major General William T. Sherman is about to lead his army of sixty thousand veterans into the heart of the Confederacy. It is the final, excruciating year of a war turned increasingly brutal and desperate.

The men of the maligned and ill-fated Confederate regiment known as the Fiftieth North Carolina look alike. Their faces are dark with smoke, their ribs protrude like barn rafters, and their uniforms are an assortment of filthy rags indiscriminately liberated from Union and Confederate dead.

Among these soldiers are George Hawkins and his brother, Walsh, unwillingly caught in the midst of a brutal war. As the regiment begins a four-hundred-mile death march from Savannah, Georgia, to Bentonville, North Carolina, George finds himself caught between his sense of honor and duty and his knowledge that they are fighting for a cause that is all but lost. Still, he takes consolation in doing in his duty and in his love of a woman--a refugee he encounters during the chaos of the Confederate retreat.

Souls of Lions is a tale of uncommon courage, heroic sacrifice, and flawed humanity amid great suffering in the swamps of North Carolina as two indifferent Confederate soldiers are transformed into the last violent months of the Civil War.

It is November of 1864, Major General William T. Sherman is about to lead his army of sixty thousand veterans into the heart of the Confederacy. It is the final, excruciating year of a war turned increasingly brutal and desperate.

The men of the maligned and ill-fated Confederate regiment known as the Fiftieth North Carolina look alike. Their faces are dark with smoke, their ribs protrude like barn rafters, and their uniforms are an assortment of filthy rags indiscriminately liberated from Union and Confederate dead.

Among these soldiers are George Hawkins and his brother, Walsh, unwillingly caught in the midst of a brutal war. As the regiment begins a four-hundred-mile death march from Savannah, Georgia, to Bentonville, North Carolina, George finds himself caught between his sense of honor and duty and his knowledge that they are fighting for a cause that is all but lost. Still, he takes consolation in doing in his duty and in his love of a woman--a refugee he encounters during the chaos of the Confederate retreat.

Souls of Lions is a tale of uncommon courage, heroic sacrifice, and flawed humanity amid great suffering in the swamps of North Carolina as two indifferent Confederate soldiers are transformed into the last violent months of the Civil War.

REVEREND SAM: THE TECHNOLOGY OF SALVATION. This is the promise of Sam, brainchild of George Henderson. George, a religious speechwriter with little faith in anything except his own cynicism, is facing pecuniary ruin due to his association with evangelical libertines. He divines an absurdity of an idea: a robot preacher who would be faultless. All that would have to be supplied would be prerecorded sermons written by George, for a nominal fee, of course.

With the support of his financier cousin, Eric, and the animatronics genius of Louis O'Cain, George sets his plan in motion. Sam's speeches soon become both popular and inflammatory. Everyone from a suspicious government to spurned business partners begin pressing from the shadows, leaving George walking a fine line between fortune and sedition.