New York, 1861. Michael O’Sullivan escapes the evicted tenant bogs of West Cork and steps off a packet ship into a city that despises his kind. Locked out by No Irish Need Apply signs and facing starvation in the Five Points slums, he does the sums and signs the recruitment ledger for forty dollars cash on the drumhead.

He sells his skin to the Union.
Mustered into the Fighting 69th New York Infantry of the Irish Brigade, Michael and his friends Sean and Liam are drilled into soldiers under Sergeant Patrick Kelleher, a veteran of the British regular army. From the malarial mud of Harrison’s Landing to Antietam and the gathering storm at Gettysburg, they learn that war is no grand crusade. It is a furnace where Irish blood is spent like cheap coin.
Michael’s intellect and nerve earn him a lieutenant’s commission and an officer’s sword. They also carry him into a harder fight than any Confederate battery: the ballrooms of New York’s wealthy Irish American elite, where old-country grudges and a dangerous past tied to the Carrigan family threaten to cost him everything.