Daniel Perry sits at his breakfast table on a June morning contemplating his life: His sixtieth went by four years ago without the watershed he'd hoped for because that was the year his wife, Anna, died. They still communicate.

He's scheduled to teach a graduate course offering an in-depth look at who Americans are now from the context of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars - a topic for which he has lost his enthusiasm. Numi, their cat, slithers onto the table, dipping his paw in the leftover cereal milk - something Anna found amusing.

Daniel feels empty. And then the phone rings.

This call sparks an unlikely watershed. His nephew Tom, whom he barely knows arrives on his doorstep one week later to live with him while attending the same University where Daniel has been professor of history.

He soon learns that Tom speaks to a ghost, Zak, their mutual ancestor who fought in the Civil War. Zak warns Tom of imminent danger.

An old enemy, Benjamin, who has lived off the grid in the northern California woods, has plotted revenge for 35 years. Long forgotten to Daniel, he now lurks nearby, ready to act.

Benjamin's traumatically disturbed, brilliant, adopted daughter, Morrigan, unknown to Daniel is one of his favorite students. While Daniel's close friends strategize with Tom how to warn him - under their noses Benjamin kidnaps Daniel.

What follows takes place in the wilds of Northern California. Benjamin enacts his psychotic obsession with the Confederacy and his revenge on Daniel about who betrayed whom when they were students writing their dissertations about the Civil War with opposite points of view.

His elaborate scheme involves a final apocalyptic scene where what happens is not what it seems. And just when things seem to be finally over, Zak warns that they are not - until the final and fateful end.

. .