Sixteen-year-old Titus Bass fears one fate more than any other: never to experience the great wilderness or the wildness inside himself. So late one night he snatches a squirrel gun and a handful of biscuits, flees into the woods, and doesn’t look back. From Louisville past the Chickasaw bluffs and the Natchez Trace all the way to New Orleans, he plunges into the rough-and-tumble life along the banks of the Mississippi: a volatile, violent country of boatmen and river bandits, knife fights and Indian raids, strong liquor and stronger women.

Preacher is heading home to the mountains when he's approached by a wealthy European with an unusual proposition. He wants the legendary mountain man to track down his missing cousin—a reckless young woman who fled to America with her lover—and he's willing to pay a small fortune to find her. Preacher isn't one to get mixed up in the affairs of fancy foreigners, but he reluctantly agrees. The search is on. Striking westward from St. Louis, Preacher quickly begins to suspect that this search party is doomed. And this trail will lead to some very dead ends.

The wild and free world of the mountain man is quickly fading into the past. For Titus Bass, leading his family north to winter with the Crow people, the journey is a sad one. He must save an old friend from death and rescue his daughter Magpie from cutthroat traders. He will try to free a wagon train of innocents from its unscrupulous leader, and he will try to come to terms with his long–lost daughter Amanda, bound for a new home in a faraway land Bass himself will never see.

Drawn by the promise of adventure and wealth, Titus Bass joins an expedition to Spanish California, where the ranchos have horses and mules in abundance. Their plan is to steal the livestock and drive it back east across the great Mojave Desert to sell to fur traders for top dollar. But pursuit by formidable Mexican soldiers and an attack by fierce Digger Indians take their toll on Bass and his fellow raiders.

In the unforgiving docklands of east London, young orphan William must do all he can to survive. Like the other ‘wharf rats', his life of petty crime is not a choice; it's a necessity. But William's misdeeds won't remain hidden for long. When the boy unknowingly steals from a murderous pirate captain, escape is his only option. He is forced to stow away and begin a life that will take him to the far side of the world; a life as a soldier of the East India Company.

Nathaniel King left New York City in 1828 to venture into the vast unexplored regions beyond Mississippi. He heads west, lured on by dreams of wealth based on his uncle's promise to share with him "the greatest treasure in the world".

This was supposed to be a journey to find his dream of starting his own spread. As he left the Bar L just northwest of Cheyenne and rode south into Colorado, Conn already knew where he wanted to build his ranch and had enough money to buy the land and get it started. It was just a hundred mile ride through open country. What could possibly go wrong?

Cole Turner left the Rocking T that morning to spend a couple of days with his brother and niece in Garden City. It was supposed to be a time of relaxation after having spent a few days moving those cattle to market. Any thought of quiet time vanished when he opened the door to his brother’s house.

1968. A time of division. A time of civil unrest. A time of war. Just before the Tet Offensive changes the dynamic in Vietnam, before President Johnson announces he will not run for reelection, before the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, as riots and protests rage across the nation, a spy ship, the USS Pueblo, is captured by communist forces off the coast of North Korea. The crew thought they had destroyed everything of intelligence value. They were wrong.

The Civil War is most remembered for the grand battles that have come to define it: Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, among others. However, as bestselling author Patrick K. O’Donnell reveals in The Unvanquished, a vital shadow war raged amid and away from the major battlefields that was in many ways equally consequential to the conflict’s outcome.