Ewer’s Rock, Virginia, 1917. Roy Young is eager to leave this isolated rural valley for university and return with the technical knowledge to modernize his family’s farm and bring them properly into the 20th century. Samantha Hatton, the minister’s daughter and Roy’s best friend since childhood, knows that both Roy and the town expect them to marry. But Samantha, a daring and ambitious young woman, hungers for more. Above them on the mountain, tending to a lost herd of cattle, is silent Ennis Duke, the mysterious wild boy whose arrival in the valley will upend Ewer’s Rock’s understanding of itself and its place in the world. Within a year, the lives of these three young people will be dramatically transformed. 

One early morning on a Norfolk beach in Virginia, a dead body is discovered by a man taking his daily swim. After narrowly surviving an assassination attempt that killed his wife and child, Arman Bajalan has been given lonely sanctuary in the US. Convinced that the body is connected to his past, he knows he is still not safe. Seasoned detective Catherine Wheel and her newly minted partner have little to go on beyond a bus ticket in the dead man’s pocket. It leads them to Sally Ewell, a local journalist who is investigating a corporation on the cusp of landing a multi-billion-dollar government defense contract. As victims mount around Arman, they find themselves in a race, committed to unraveling the truth and keeping Arman alive --- even if it costs them absolutely everything.

Spanning over 100 years, from the antebellum era to the 1980s, A SHOUT IN THE RUINS examines the fates of the inhabitants of Beauvais Plantation outside of Richmond, Virginia. When war arrives, the master of Beauvais, Anthony Levallios, foresees that dominion in a new America will be measured not in acres of tobacco under cultivation by his slaves, but in industry and capital. A grievously wounded Confederate veteran loses his grip on a world he no longer understands, and his daughter finds herself married to Levallois, an arrangement that feels little better than imprisonment. And two people enslaved at Beauvais plantation, Nurse and Rawls, overcome impossible odds to be together, only to find that the promise of coming freedom may not be something they will live to see.

In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger.