Fire in the Water

Paddy Quinn, "the boy who ate rattlesnakes" and lost a hand to a cannon blast during the Mexican War, returns as a famous Civil War correspondent and battlefield sketch artist, in James Alexander Thom's new novel, Fire in the Water . Thom is a prize-winning historical novelist, and author of the New York Times bestseller Follow the River . The central action in Fire in the Water is the tragic explosion and burning of the paddlewheel steamboat SULTANA near Memphis in the last days of the Civil War, killing some 1,800 homebound Yankee survivors of the hellish Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp in Geor?gia. But the undercurrent of the novel is the national mourning for assas?sinated President Lincoln, whose corpse was en route on his funeral train to Springfield, Illinois at the time of the disaster. War correspon?dent Quinn, newly wed in New Orleans, is on board the SULTANA with his bride, assigned to report and illustrate Lincoln's funeral and burial for Harper's Weekly. When Quinn and an Indiana-born prison survivor he's interviewing are blown overboard into the cold, flooded Mississippi by the mid?night boiler explosion, it is their grit and resourcefulness, but mostly their vow to get to Lincoln's funeral, that keep them alive as hundreds perish around them in the flame-lit night.