The book examines uncertainty of command at the army, corps, and division levels and emphasizes the confusion and fear of ground combat at the level of company and battalion - "where they do the dying." Its gripping description of the battle is based on government records, a rich selection of first-person accounts from veterans of both sides, and author Edward G. Miller's visits to the battlefield. The result is a compelling and comprehensive account of small-unit action set against the background of the larger command levels. The book's foreword is by retired Maj. Gen. R. W. Hogan, who was a battalion commander in the forest.

THE SAGA CONTINUESPerryville, Kentucky, October 8, 1862. The small town of just under 400 residents has the notable distinction of unwittingly hosting the largest battle ever fought in the State of Kentucky. From before sunrise until well after dark 70,000 soldiers waged war, smashed homes, dismantled fences, trampled crops, shattering the trees and killing one another wholesale. The struggle was, according to one Southern general who was there, the severest and most desperately contested engagement to my knowledge. The reader witnesses this historic carnage through the eyes of eleven different protagonists, both Northern and Southern, both infamous and common. From Brigadier General Phil Sheridan to Private George Kilpatrick and from Brigadier General Pat Cleburne to Private Sam Watkins, the Battle of Perryville is revealed and revered in this strikingly particular fictional narrative.

An Edgar Award–winning author’s true crime account of a grisly string of killings in Kentucky—and the shocking spectacle of greed that followed. Kentucky never deserved its Indian appellation “A Dark and Bloody Ground” more than when a small-town physician, seventy-seven-year-old Roscoe Acker, called in an emergency on a sweltering evening in August 1985. Acker’s own life hung in the balance, but it was already too late for his college-age daughter, Tammy, savagely stabbed eleven times and pinned by a kitchen knife to her bedroom floor. Three men had breached Dr. Acker’s alarm and security systems and made off with the fortune he had stashed away over his lifetime. The killers—part of a three-man, two-woman gang of the sort not seen since the Barkers—stopped counting the moldy bills when they reached $1.9 million. The cash came in handy soon after when they were caught and needed to lure Kentucky’s most flamboyant lawyer, the celebrated and corrupt Lester Burns, into representing them. Full of colorful characters and desperate deeds, A Dark and Bloody Ground is a “first-rate” true crime chronicle from the author of Murder in Little Egypt (Kirkus Reviews). “An arresting look into the troubled psyches of these criminals and into the depressed Kentucky economy that became fertile territory for narcotics dealers, theft rings and bootleggers.” —Publishers Weekly “The smell of wet, coal-laden earth, white lightning, and cocaine-driven sweat arises from these marvelously atmospheric—and compelling—pages.” —Kirkus Reviews “A fascinating portrait of the mountain way of life and thought that forged the lives of these criminals.” —Library Journal

In 1938, twenty-one-year-old Francisco Pérez López, born in Spain and raised in France and Algeria, joined the International Brigades to fight the Nationalist armies of Franco and became a part of the bloodiest guerrilla war in Spanish history. His feats were remarkable. As the commander of the Brigades' First Death Platoon, as a jack-of-all-trades prisoner, and as the feared and admired guerrilla leader El Mexicano, Pérez López performed exploits that grew and spread in reputation throughout Spain -- until he became a legend. This is his own book: Dark and Bloody Ground, a terse and factual account of his part in the Spanish Civil War. In simple, spare language it tells a staggeringly dramatic story. With a remarkable feeling for the physical immediacy of people, terrain, and weather, Pérez López tells of months of hit-and-run attacks and day-to-day survival; and of his youth, which helped prepare him for this war by teaching him how to do everything from baking bread to setting bones, from making love to handling knives. He relates the sometimes humorous, often horrifying details of capture and imprisonment by the Nationalists, where his wits were all that kept him alive; and his incredible odyssey of escape, in which as head of a band of guerrillas he hid, attacked, and zigzagged his way to the Pyrenees. There, in the middle of a blizzard in the dead of winter, having lost all his men, he crossed the French border to freedom. His story is at once coldly objective and intensely personal. Pérez López has an innate ability to convey feelings he hardly ever expresses in words -- the physical and emotional weariness brought about by a long, cruel war, the satisfaction of avenging a victim of the Nationalists. Dark and Bloody Ground is not only a unique eyewitness account of a little-understood war, it is a deeply human story of a man whose motivation for fighting stemmed from a sincere respect for human dignity rather than from any political considerations -- and it is a completely gripping tale of chase and adventure, of pure war reduced to the basics of kill or be killed. Death has been very, very close to Pérez López. This stark and powerful narrative is the extraordinary result: Dark and Bloody Ground.

This book chronicles not only the remarkable military victory at Mansfield but the subsequent engagements that forced Union forces into an ignominious withdrawal.