Near starvation in Northern Georgia, Confederate private Henry Wallace of Hood's Texas Brigade accidentally ingests psychotropic mushrooms before marching into the second day of the Battle of Chickamauga, but lives to tell about it in a long (forty-one-foot) letter to his dead comrade's father. Or does he? As Private Wallace's meandering tale, scrawled on a roll of wrapping paper, unravels, historians and scholars battle in footnotes over whether this document full of peculiar claims, internal inconsistencies, and anachronistic content is a first-hand report or an elaborate forgery.

Ne er-do-well immigration attorney Harrison Bent can t imagine why the wealthy and mysterious Maggie Leudecke wants him to solve her eminent domain problem. If he didn t have an angry wife to placate, an inscrutable stalker to identify, an obsessed girlfriend to escape, and a murder to solve, a successful outcome to the Leudecke case might revive his career, pay for his autistic son s special school, and most important of all help convince his young paralegal, Chloe, that the afternoon she spent with him in a cheap motel wasn t an error in judgment, but the beginning of something profound. If...