In the summer of 1863, Judson Walker, a captain of Morgan's Raiders, and Jonathan Reid, a young engineer, come to Furnass to appropriate two of Colin Lyle's steam-powered road engines. The purpose is to outfit the engines with iron plate and the newly developed Gatlin Guns, and, with Morgan, deliver the war engines to General Lee's army in Central Pennsylvania. Amid Walker's growing involvement with Lyle's wife Libby, deserting soldiers, and Reid's own agenda, Walker learns Morgan isn't coming. The novel reaches its climax with Lyle trying to sabotage the war engines. Walker must decide between Libby and duty toward his men, the war and individual human values. The Books of Furnass tell the story of a fictitious mill town, ten miles from Pittsburgh in southwestern Pennsylvania. At the heart of the series is the Furnass Towers Trilogy, about the efforts of men and women to maintain their lives, and the life of the town, in the face of the mill closings. In addition to contemporary life, the series chronicles the town when it was just an outpost after the French and Indian War...the town as it grew around an iron furnace in the wilderness...as it became an industrial center from the time of the American Civil War to the Vietnam War. And the series tells the story of the Lyle family, who were involved with the town from its founding to its struggles to survive after the mills went away. "A vivid and intensely personal story couched within the chaos, madness and sacrifice of the Civil War. ... The suspense that builds up about these characters' true identities, and intentions, builds steadily from the very first pages and rarely lets up, pushing boundaries of loyalty, love, country and humanity." - SPR "Snodgrass artfully infuses the plot with tantalizing suspense that feels like a cord pulled taut that could break at any moment. This is not a formulaic rendering of the distance between the personal and the obligatory but something deeper and more profound. ... The author's impressive achievement is to upend the simplistic interpretation of the Civil War: two sides warring against each other out of perfectly confident and implacable hate. A thoughtful and powerfully written war novel." - Kirkus Reviews "The complex characters, faced daily with choices between their deepest desires and their integrity, in the midst of war, make compelling reading. ... For readers looking for complex characters set against the dramatic backdrop of the Civil War, Richard Snodgrass' ACROSS THE RIVER is a beautiful historical novel that proves history is created and changed by individuals, not just events." - Indie Reader, IR Approved Richard Snodgrass is an author and photographer whose short stories and essays have appeared in the New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly, South Dakota Review, California Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is a master photographer who has been artist-in-residence at LightWorks (University of Syracuse) and at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 1989, Viking published Snodgrass's novel, There's Something in the Back Yard, to critical acclaim: "Observe this mysterious book and be changed," wrote Jack Stephens in the Washington Post Book World. Snodgrass is also the author of An Uncommon Field: The Flight 93 Temporary Memorial, published in September of 2011 by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and Kitchen Things: An Album of Vintage Utensils and Farm Kitchen Recipes, published in 2013 by Skyhorse and named one of the year's "best books to get you thinking about food" by the Associated Press. Richard Snodgrass lives in Pittsburgh, PA, with his wife Marty and two indomitable female tuxedo cats, raised from feral kittens, named Frankie and Becca.