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. The central action in this novel 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 Georgia. But the undercurrent of the novel is the national mourning for assassinated President Lincoln, whose corpse was en-route on his funeral train to Springfield, Illinois at the time of the disaster.