Battle Hymn

Chicago, August 1, 1919. The city is on edge as the race riots rage into their sixth day. Jacob Gartener, a 75-year-old widower and Civil War veteran, sets out from his boarding house to collect rent from the tenants of his three houses in the Black Belt. What should be a routine task soon thrusts him into a world of danger, moral reckoning, and unexpected passion.

His first stop is Miriam Harpeth, a woman he has known since 1862, when he was a soldier in the 56th Indiana and she a laundress attached to his regiment. But what awaits him on this fateful day is more than a reunion-his quiet existence is about to be upended by a violent crime, an unlikely friendship, and, astonishingly, the stirrings of romance he thought long behind him.

Jacob has witnessed war, endured loss, and carried the weight of grief, but nothing has prepared him for the choices now before him. As the city burns and tensions rise, his unshakable sense of duty and his relentless need to matter will be tested in ways he never imagined. In a time of chaos, will he stand firm, or will the past he thought he had left behind shape his future in ways he never saw coming?