A Trooper Galahad

The ruins of a soldier's honor scatter more quietly than any battlefield defeat. Captain Edgar Lawrence learned this truth the hard way, when a court-martial he did not deserve stripped him of everything: his commission, his name, and his wife, who died of a broken heart when the army turned its back on him. Now he rides toward Washington, toward the distant hope of redress, through a landscape still scarred by the war that made and destroyed him. Charles King, who knew the military from the inside, paints the post-Civil War army as a place where bureaucracy can wound deeper than any rebel bullet. Colonel Frazier and Major Brooks gather in a Texas outpost to mourn their fallen comrade, not knowing that Lawrence's journey will test whether justice has any place in a world that has already moved on from the men who fought its wars. This is a story about the last champions of a vanishing code, and the price they pay for believing that honor still matters.