Shadow on the Valley/a Civil War Thriller - Hardcover

Roaming far from the California settings of his earlier novels (With Siberia Comes a Chill, 1991; Black Dragon, 1988), Mitchell reappears with a richly historical, if far-fetched and overwrought, tale of a mad killer loose among the Union Army laying waste to Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in the last year of the Civil War. Surgeon Simon Wolfe is Sheridan's Medical Director during a scorched-earth pursuit of a dwindling yet deadly Confederate force, and he deftly manages a logistical nightmare of field hospitals and ambulances in spite of having lost an arm in an earlier engagement. His ethical standards are high, so that when he finds a woman stabbed to death in a burning house he is morally outraged. A witness, the beautiful Rebekka Zelter--belonging, like the victim, to a sect of German pacifists--accepts his care but proves unbalanced by her ordeal; while Simon is about his duties and trying to convince Sheridan to hunt the killer, she opts to strip down and join the corpses in the army morgue. When another murder takes place, Simon puts his career on the line to force an investigation. Censured by Sheridan and sent into battle, he acts heroically, but even though befriended by the Boy General Custer, he faces dismissal--until yet another corpse turns up. Focusing his suspicion on Sheridan, Simon all but takes the law into his own hands when he believes Rebekka in danger. A chance encounter with one of Mosby's Rangers, however, and a brush with death by poisoning provide proof that his witness is much more than a mere observer. Neither the heat of battles well reconstructed nor the many details of a pivotal Civil War campaign can long disguise the implausibility and confusion of this thriller run amok. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Although well written, this latest addition to the recent spate of historical whodunits suffers from slow pacing. In the fall of 1864, as Sheridan's troops march through Virginia, Simon Wolfe, the Southern-born medical director for the Union Army of the Shenandoah, discovers the body of a brutally murdered woman and a terrified eyewitness--both members of the Dunker church, which is neutral in the conflict. Sheridan wants the killing hushed up; President Lincoln could be harmed in his upcoming election battle against Democratic candidate George McClellan if news gets out that the Union army harbors a murderer. But Wolfe will not let the matter rest; he raises suspicions against several of his fellow officers, including George Armstrong Custer, and his search for justice becomes a crucial battle in the civil war of his own divided loyalties. Mitchell ( With Siberia Comes a Chill ) fills his book with sharply drawn original and historical characters, notably the mercurial, profane Sheridan and Wolfe himself, a believable, troubled outsider whose principles constantly set him against his superiors. The mystery element, however, frequently gets lost in the much more interesting conflicts surrounding the main character.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.