Search Worlds Without End

Tidewater Virginia... 1832. A young country grinds toward civil war, and one man torn between two worlds will transform many lives in his struggle for identity and power. Dorian Trozen has his slave mother's unconquerable pride and will, his father's white skin and cunning. Educated in secret by his father's wife, loved by two mothers, white and black, he is bound to the plantation, never to see the world he knows through his precious books. And when his two lives clash in an inevitable moment of violence, he wins his beloved freedom... and plunges headlong into a deep well of rage.

From brutal bondage to fugitive flight for a crime he didn't commit, Dorian has made the bitter choice to follow the fortunes of the South. With battle lines drawn between North and South, black and white, he is the man who will cross them all... with only his life and his soul to lose.

As a nation thunders toward war, a series of events is played out on a vast international stage... events that will cast the destiny of anew age.

Bound together in the web of war, four people divided by hatred and hope embark on separate missions that could make the Confederacy an independent nation - or leave it in ruins. They are: Dorian Trozen, the white-skinned ex-slave, torn between two worlds and driven by his towering will to survive and thrive in the South he can never call home; Wyatt Crain, thrust by his success into a storm of international intrigue; Alexander Wallace, the Tidewater aristocrat whose search for his long-lost half brother would lead to a secret crusade to end slavery; and Grace MacHutcheon, the seductive Northern spy consumed by a dark, desperate passion for revenge.

Rise Defiant is the powerful epic of a nation caught between faith and honor, freedom and injustice, war and peace... an the unforgettable saga of the proud, passionate men and women who gave their last full measure of devotion in the struggle for love and liberty.