In SHENANDOAH, the scene returns to Culpeper County, Virginia. Titus Brannon returns home on Christmas Day, 1863, a little over a year after his disappearance in battle, only to learn that his wife, Polly, is now married to his brother Henry. And she is pregnant.

Titus does not accept Polly and Henry's marriage, and when a judge agrees that she is still his wife, he refuses to agree to a divorce. Later, she is found dead at her father's plantation and the evidence points to Titus. Proven innocent of the crime, he leaves home to join the rangers of John S. Mosby. In the spring, Will Brannon rejoins Robert E. Lee's army as it resists the Union army's march on Richmond led by U. S. Grant. During the contest at Cold Harbor, he is killed.

The Confederacy and the Brannons have suffered much in 1864. Now even the hotheaded Titus—who has vowed revenge on the Yankee army that is ravaging the Shenandoah Valley—beings to wonder if the nation and his family will survive into 1865....

Appomattox brings us to the thundering climax of James Reasoner's ten-volume Civil War saga. As the war careens toward its inevitable end, members of the Brannon family are involved in every theater of the war and spread across the South. For a time, Mac and Titus fight in the Shenandoah Valley with Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry and Mosby's Rangers. In the Carolinas Cory fights against William T. Sherman, and in Alabama Henry rides with Nathan Bedford Forrest.
With the coming of spring in 1865, the war reaches its climax in Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama. Mac is not far from the McLean house when Robert E. Lee meets with U.S. Grant. Cory is on hand, too, when Joseph E. Johnston parleys with Sherman, but Titus finds himself enmeshed in a complicated scheme regarding one of the darkest plots of the war.
The Brannon farm is among the war's last victims. As carpetbaggers move into the South, it is too prime a piece of real estate to leave in the hands of staunch Confederates. The Brannons must either fight or flee, and they are exhausted by the fighting. The unsettled West holds more promise than the scarred and wrecked land of northern Virginia, but before she departs, a grieving mother must visit the grave of her firstborn at the lonely crossroads of Cold Harbor....