Iron Thunder: The Battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac
Tom becomes assistant to the ship’s inventor, a gruff, boastful man named Captain John Ericsson. He soon learns that the Union army has very important plans for this iron ship called the Monitor. It is supposed to fight the Confederate “sea monster”–another ironclad–the Merrimac. But Ericsson is practically the only person who believes the Monitor will float. Everyone else calls it “Ericsson’s Folly” or “the iron coffin.”
Meanwhile, Tom’s position as Ericsson’s assistant has made him a target of Confederate spies, who offer him money for information about the ship. Tom finds himself caught between two certain dangers: an encounter with murderous spies and a battle at sea in an iron coffin.
Black Dragons
Growing up on a tobacco plantation should be a simple life, predictable as the changing seasons, but when unlikely friends become entangled in the politics and shifting loyalties of nations, life is anything but simple. What starts as a plan to protect the families living on one small plantation, captures the attention of world powers vying for control of the American Colonies and the Islands of the Caribbean.
With few options available, untried heroes find themselves caught in a deadly struggle to protect their ideals, their freedoms and their lives. At every turn their friendship and loyalty to each other and to those brave men they come to lead, is tested. Can the innocent companionship of childhood stand in the face of hatred, prejudice, and war between world powers? Will the ideals that they embody become a testimony to a new world vision for an emerging nation?
