The Unfinished Letter

He went to war believing it would make him.

In 1853 the Jones family left Hanover Furnace in the New Jersey Pine Barrens for Florence, where Richard Jones built an iron works on the Delaware and a twenty-one-room house for his family. His son Ivins, called Ivy, grew up there with every advantage the family's iron could buy. Sent away to Haverford, he counted the days until he could come home.

In 1861, at nineteen, he rode south as an officer of the 1st New Jersey Cavalry. He came through the ambush at Harrisonburg and the fighting at Cedar Mountain. He also watched rank go to men with the right friends, and in the winter of 1863 he resigned his commission, writing home that these things had long since ceased to go by merit.

The war was not finished with him. Home had no place he fit. Drink came easily and left slowly. He sailed for Demerara in British Guiana to begin again, and when that did not hold he came back and enlisted once more, this time as a private. When the war ended, the Jones fortune began to give way beneath the family that had built it.

The Unfinished Letter follows a gifted young man through the years that tested him hardest: the pride of a family that expected everything of him and the friends who stood by him. It is a novel about promise and its cost, and about what a family chooses to remember.

The Unfinished Letter is the fourth novel in The Line of the Black Water, the story of the Jones ironmaster family of the New Jersey Pine Barrens.