Michael Patrick Leahy author of Civil War novels

Michael Patrick Leahy's Fort Desperate (coming in 2007), is the first book of the Trans-Mississippi Trilogy, which tells the long neglected story of the Civil War in Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas through the eyes of the men and women who lived it.

Fort Desperate takes the reader from antebellum New Orleans to the fall of Port Hudson, Louisiana in July, 1863. The Red River (2008) continues the story through May, 1864. And The Black Codes (2009) completes the story through the end of the Civil War, the beginning of Reconstruction, and the race riots of New Orleans in 1866 and 1867.

Readers will not be able to put down the compelling stories of Andre Cailloux, an emancipated slave who becomes a legendary military leader, Richard Taylor, the brilliant and privileged son of the Confederacy, who fights a daring underdog campaign, and Nathaniel Banks, the Yankee political general who dreams of the Presidency for himself.

In the late spring of 1863, the Confederacy's hold on a small patch of the Missisippi River is tenous. Bound on the north by Vicksburg, Mississippi and the south by Port Hudson, Louisiana, this 120 mile stretch provides the vital connection between the supplies of men and material from Texas and the west to the beleaguered east. Should either of these two outposts fall, the Confederacy may not survive.

By May of 1863, both Vicksburg and Port Hudson are under siege. At Port Hudson, 30,000 troops under the command of Nathaniel Banks have bottled up the 6,000 troops under the command of Franklin Gardner. As Gardner prepares for the inevitable assault, he has a terrible realization. His position will be undefensible if he cannot secure and fortify a hill just outside his earthworks.

Colonel Ben Johnson is given an impossible challenge. Build an earthworks fortification on that hill, and defend it against the thousands of Yankees that are about to come. And do it in 24 hours. Johnson's hastily built defenses, called Fort Desperate, become as important to Port Hudson as Little Big Top is to Gettysburg. Andre Cailloux and George Davey are two of the Yankee soldiers who must take this hill, or die trying.

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