View Tree Mountain Serial Saga Book One: The Vow

Retribution murder sent railroad attorney and Confederate veteran Brad Jamison to San Quentin prison in 1869, severing him from wife Polly and his beloved Virginia homeland.

Seven years later, Polly discovers a tattered diary so potentially life-changing that she travels by rail from Virginia to California, in order to hand the diary to Brad.

Upon observing his state of health and mind in the prison's fetid darkness, Polly implores him to write a memoir of his own —your truth, she terms it— to restore his soul.
To counteract the lies and foolishness in an old adversary's diary.
To inspire him to return home to Virginia when he is released.

As he feels a surge of hope and possibility, he recalls other words from the past: 'You have the heart of a poet.'
Brakeman McLean's words. Spoken in love, not in jest.
The railroad brakeman and the railroad lawyer. Mystical kinship. Adultery of the heart. No one else knew. Dare he write of it now?

He will boldly pen his and Polly's journey from unity to loss, and may his truth clear a path to reconciliation when he is free. But first, on page one, he must go to Hilton Head Island and confront a man whose atrocities foreshadowed a trail to San Quentin.

From antebellum Virginia through Civil War and westward expansion; from railroad boardrooms to camptown taverns, truths and secrets are laid bare.

"View Tree Mountain" serial saga combines Brad's and Polly's 1859 independent memoirs and their 1876 private journals with trickster Lorena Elliot's 1859-1865 diary, to determine if Brad and Polly can claim a joint future.