Following his acclaimed debut, Waterborne , Bruce Murkoff gives us another American panorama with a Civil War novel unlike any other. Born near Rondout, New York, to a family steeped in wars both before and after independence, Will Harp returns home in 1864 for the first time in a decade, disconsolate over the campaigns being waged against Indians in the West even as the nation is busy tearing itself apart. His father is now buried in the Harp graveyard, surrounded by two preceding generations, and much else, too, has changed. For Mickey Blessing, though, these are heady times. Serving the darker needs of a prosperous businessman, Harry Grieves, he commands fear and respect as few Irish immigrants have managed to do in a society still hostile to their presence. The man he’d replaced had enlisted and is now missing in the horrors of Cold Harbor, leaving Mickey’s sister, Jane, fearing the worst about her fiancé’s survival. Coley Hinds, orphaned as a child, is fending for himself and fast growing savvy as the town around him bustles with trade and tragedy. In his stable-basement lodgings, he reads Western serials that he hopes will describe his future, but then falls under the sway of Mickey, who recognizes in him the powerless waif he once had been himself. All of these lives and more are intertwined when the bones of a mastodon surface on a neighboring farm that Will quickly purchases, pursuing a fervent boyhood interest. He finds an eager assistant in Coley, who suddenly needs refuge from budding criminality when Mickey suffers a hideous loss and develops an unhealthy obsession with a baby found on Jug Hill, where free black people have lived for generations. And before long, every fate is uncertain as calamity threatens to envelop them all. Red Rain is masterful in both its specifics—Coley’s pet squirrel, the erotic tableaux Will’s photographer friend contrives, the bakery where Jane finds comfort as well as income—and its broad historical sweep, which reaches from the settling of the Hudson River Valley to the bloodshed now ravaging the South and the West. Its characterizations are impeccable, whether of Grieves’s dream of a grand hotel or Mickey’s love of water, with not one gripping love story but several. And its plotting is relentless, weaving stories from various times and places that inevitably converge, right here in Rondout, with heart-stopping intensity. Engrossing and revelatory, Red Rain shows an extraordinarily talented writer expanding his already great range, and at the very top of his form. Set in five months in 1864 in the Hudson River Valley, Murkoff's second novel (after Waterborne, 2004) vividly captures the life of the time, the damage done by war, and the ruthlessness of greed. After serving as a doctor in the army and surviving the Shoshone campaign in Utah, Will Harp returns to claim his family homestead in Rondout, guilt-ridden about his actions in the heat of battle and about lack of contact with his father before he died. Will finds an adversary in Mickey Blessing, the charmingly amoral hired muscle of a powerful businessman who needs Will's land to fulfill his dream. Their lives intersect with teenage orphan Coley Hind, who switches allegiance between the two men. This is less focused than Waterborne, which centered on the building of Boulder Dam; instead, it's a sprawling, meandering novel, chock-full of sensory detail that is sometimes painfully acute—as in portraying grief when a loved one is lost in war—and scattered with flashbacks to fill in backstories. Plot matters less here than evocation of time and place, and Murkoff is a master at that. --Michele Leber “A rich, thick stew of an historical novel, powerfully imagined and thoroughly believable… Red Rain is an engaging and bloody-minded read of great conviction that hints at a dark vision of the American present through its confident handling of our past….Gorgeous.” —Peter Behrens, The Washington Post   “Remarkable….Written with a gritty, melancholy beauty, Red Rain is American storytelling at its best.” —Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today   “A sprawling, meandering novel, chock-full of sensory detail that is sometimes painfully acute…Murkoff is a master at [the] evocation of time and place.” —Michele Leber, Booklist   “[A] dense, deliberate, and lush saga that will surely appeal to readers who appreciate brawny historicals.” — Publishers Weekly   “It is not sufficient to say that Bruce Murkoff is a terrific writer of historical fiction.  He’s a terrific writer, period, and his ability shines through again in Red Rain .” —Kevin Baker   “In prying his spade to uncover a remote backwater and its inhabitants during seminal moments of America’s history, the Civil War as well as the Indian wars of the western expansion, Bruce Murkoff takes a tremendous risk, but the result is page-turning brilliance. With a remarkable cast of characters and spot-on authenticity, Red Rain delivers no simple tale of love, lo