The Mercy of Strangers

Virginia, October 1864. The Shenandoah Valley is burning.

When Cecily Vale arrives at Heron's Gate field hospital with a satchel of smuggled quinine and a false name, she needs only one thing: to keep her brother alive long enough to walk out of a Union ward. What she doesn't expect is a surgeon who notices too much and asks too little - and a freedwoman who has been watching both of them since before they knew they needed watching.

Dr. Elias Crane has learned, across two years of war, to keep his assessments clean and his conclusions to himself. Cecily Brewster is a supply courier with surgical hands and a story that doesn't add up. He needs what she brought him. He tells himself that's enough.

Ruth Moses has run Heron's Gate through occupation, fever, and the particular arithmetic of keeping people alive in a house that doesn't belong to her anymore. She sees what passes between Cecily and Elias before either of them will name it. She has her own plans for what comes after the war - and she has not survived twenty-two years at Heron's Gate by letting other people's secrets become her problem.

Set against the final months of the Valley Campaign, The Mercy of Strangers is a novel about the cost of loyalty, the precision required to save a life, and what it means to choose a future when the war hasn't finished choosing for you.

For readers of Cold Mountain, The Women, and Hamnet.