ROCKWALL, TX (March 31, 2014) Novelist Joe B. Hewitt will offer and sign his new book, My Love, My Enemy, from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday, April 19 at Half Price Books in Rockwall. Men will see it as a spy thriller, and women will see it as a romance, the author said.
My Love, My Enemy, involves Fairfax, a Confederate Army officer, and his wife, Cassandra, who, unknown to him, has become a Union spy.
Dr. Mike Williams, Professor of History at Dallas Baptist University said, “Joe Hewitt weaves an intriguing and tragic story of the cataclysm that rocked the United States in the 1860s and likewise ripped apart many American families. Part historical novel, part thriller, and part romance, this book will both entertain and sadden. Especially descriptive is Hewitt’s account of the terrors experienced by prisoners of war in the Union version of the notorious Confederate camp at Andersonville, the equally brutal Camp Douglas in Chicago, Illinois.”
Literary Critic Nancy Riddick said, “WOW! I LOVE LOVE LOVE this book. It is right up my alley! I hope to be finished with it by weeks end. I have found some little things but nothing too major. I am hoping I have not missed anything in my greed to get to the next sentence and the next paragraph.”
Author Joe B. Hewitt’s grandfather enlisted in the Confederate Army July 4, 1861, in Jefferson County, Alabama, and served throughout the war. He emigrated to Texas in 1870.
Although My Love, My Enemy, is fiction, the story meshes with actual events.
My Love, My Enemy is Hewitt’s third novel. He previously published Murder on the Sky Ride in 2012 and Mystery of the Vanished Gold in 2013.
He began his writing career as a reporter for the Lima, Ohio, News. He covered the police beat and went undercover to expose a ring of vice and crime.
At age 31, Hewitt left the newspaper business, went to seminary, and pastored churches for 39 years. During that time, however, he did not stop writing. He wrote newspaper columns, editorials, travel and feature articles, and Bible commentaries for Bible teachers, published by Lifeway, the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, and non-fiction, religious books.
In recent years Hewitt started writing fiction by mining life’s experiences, world travels, interesting characters, and wild imagination. “Nonfiction is demanding. You have to keep your facts straight and document everything. In fiction, you just make things up. That’s much more fun,” he said. “I hope people enjoy reading My Love, My Enemy, as much as I enjoyed writing it.”
Synopsis
(My Love, My Enemy, by Joe B. Hewitt, Historical Fiction, 75,000 Words, 284 Pages, Paperback.)
An anomaly for her time, Cassandra although a Virginian, hates slavery and is an avowed abolitionist, an unpopular view in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1858. Fairfax and Cassandra become intimate at an early age. They marry after Fairfax’s graduation from West Point. She longs for a child.
When the Civil War breaks out, Fairfax resigns his US Army commission and joins the Confederacy. He is ordered on detached duty as a Confederate spy. He assumes the identity of a Union officer named William Wiley and establishes himself in the War Department in Washington.
Cassandra volunteers to spy for the Union. She takes advantage of her position as the wife of a Confederate Army major to attend social functions and gather intelligence.
Fairfax and Cassandra are totally in love, and long for each other, but are separated ideologically and geographically, and unaware of the other’s wartime activities.
Both go through narrow escapes in action scenes. Both are totally convinced of the rightness of their cause, and use the same slogan, “Our cause is just. Continue we must.”
Fairfax gets caught, escapes Washington, and twice more gets into traps, which he escapes by assuming the identity of William Wiley, Captain, US Army. Eventually he is found out and sent to the notorious Camp Douglas in Chicago where one out of four Confederate prisoners died.
After the War Between the States ends, the war between Fairfax and Cassandra begins as they learn one another’s secrets. Fairfax is shocked to learn that he once ordered his own wife killed while she served the Union using the code name Lavender. After the real US officer vanishes, Fairfax is arrested as William Wiley for desertion of the US Army and put on trial by court martial.
The conflict between the two central characters who love each other deeply, is a microcosm of the conflict between the North and South, and the difficult reconciliation after the war.
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