April, 1898 — As America steamrolls toward war with Spain, Major Patrick Sherman Tinen, an aging Union veteran of the Civil War and a hero at Gettysburg, is sleepwalking through old age at the mammoth National Soldiers’ Home in Elizabeth City, Virginia. But then Tinen’s son, a failed Klondike prospector, is murdered after a clumsy attempt to blackmail one of Philadelphia’s most powerful financiers.