Mr. Cornwell,

I have finished reading the Starbuck Chronicles and am well-pleased with the battle actions as well as the superb characterizations. For me, a great charm of historical fiction is the opportunity to “meet” noteworthy historic personages such as Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and George McClellan. In the Starbuck series you have also introduced fictional characters of exceeding interest, such as Belvidere Delaney, Thaddeus Bird, Thomas Truslow, Sally Truslow, Billy Blythe (who has yet to receive his just desserts),the Reverend Elial Starbuck and Nathaniel Starbuck himself. I hope you will one day write a fifth Starbuck novel as there is so much more to the Civil War story beyond Antietam. Gettysburg! Gettysburg ranks among the most pivotal battles of all time, rivaling even Waterloo, arguably. And we have yet to meet Ulysses Grant. I realize that the last book of the series was published in the nineteen-nineties, and that you’ve had other literary interests intervening, but allow me to gently remind you that at the end of “The Bloody Ground,” you promised, in your Historical Note section, that “Starbuck will march again.” I’m not holding you to that, only hoping that you will continue the saga one day.

All the best.

Keith Biesiada

I really enjoy your writing, I was hoping there might be a chance for an ending or an extension to the Starbucks series. I finished reading all of them 2 weeks before taking a guided battlefield tour of Gettysburg and was amazed at how much I knew.

Larry