Yesterday, Vesta House Publishing announced release of Civil War novel “Tempting Skies”:

Bountiful, Utah (October 31, 2016) — Vesta House Publishing is pleased to announce publication of Tempting Skies, Book Three, Beyond the Wood, by international-award-winning author Michael J. Roueche.

The 368-page novel is the final book in the historical fiction series set in the American Civil War.

Four decades after the Civil War, former Kentucky slave Victoria Richman has passed away. Among her belongings, her bereft family discovers a narrative she’s written recounting the summer of 1864 in Virginia and Washington City. Mrs. Richman’s manuscript describes a defining year in the lives that intersect hers:

• Betsy, a Southern sympathizer stranded in Washington City, tries to escape a scheming sociopath, even as the war’s devastation trudges southward toward her Shenandoah Valley homestead.

• William Richman, at last a legally free man, painfully struggles to scrape away slavery’s emotional scars and remnant self-doubt. Amidst inner disarray and outer humiliation, he battles for his place in a new social order of liberty framed in 19th-Century racism.

• Victoria struggles to find meaning in her new life. Thoughtful and intelligent, she resists a mundane life far from the war and its shifting purpose as she lives the climax of the trilogy.

“War, romance and mystery collide in this deeply researched Civil War novel,” proclaimed the Denver Post of the first book in the series, Beyond the Wood.

The initial installment recounts the story of Betsy struggling with burdens left by the death of her Confederate soldier husband and the conspiracy of neighbors. At the same time, she becomes the obsession of a Union soldier who imagines a romance that drives him relentlessly toward an impossible rendezvous with her. The 514-page novel was recipient of the 2012 John Esten Cooke Award for Civil War and Southern history.

Midwest Book Review “highly recommended” the second in the series, A River Divides. It called the book “a sober, thoughtful, and expertly researched Civil War novel.” The work was selected Drama Category Winner, Laramie Awards for Western, Pioneer and Civil War fiction.

The 395-page novel begins in the winter of 1864 as Eastern Theater soldiers languish in camp boredom, and conspiracy and treachery envelop Betsy. Meanwhile, her family’s runaway slave William, craving his chance to fight for the Union, flees Virginia, stumbling into the murky waters of Kentucky servitude.

Michael J. Roueche grew up in Virginia and spent most of his life in the Old Dominion. He holds degrees from Brigham Young University and Virginia Tech and spent many years in corporate communications. He and his wife of 40 years currently reside in Colorado. They have five kids and several grandchildren.

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