The prologue and the first six chapters of Knights of the Golden Circle are ready to read, free.
This is the part I most wanted you to see, where a cipher carried home and passed down from the Civil War turns into something a lot larger than a treasure hunt. Book 3 releases August 18. This is where it begins.
A Taste of Chapter 1
Jack Sullivan is a history professor at Penn State. It’s the last lecture of the semester, and he’s decided to go off-syllabus.
“Anybody here heard of the Knights of the Golden Circle?”
Three hands out of forty. About what he’d figured.
“Right. They’re the band that never made it big but influenced everyone who came after. Think of them as the Velvet Underground of Civil War conspiracies.” Jack held up the medallion. “This little beauty? Membership token. Like a backstage pass to treason.”
He clicked his laptop, and an 1864 political cartoon filled the screen: Lincoln depicted as a tyrant, boot on the throat of the Constitution.
“Quick question. How many Union soldiers died in the Civil War?”
“360,000?” Phillips said. The kid always sat front row, always had his hand up.
“Close. 365,000. Now, how many Union soldiers straight-up walked away? Deserted?”
Silence.
“200,000.” Jack wrote the number on the board. “Nearly half as many guys said ‘screw this’ as died for the cause. Nobody ever asks why.”
In the third row, a girl stopped mid-note. Stared at the board. Did the math again, quietly, to herself.
Martinez raised her hand. “Bad conditions? Poor leadership?”
“That’s what the textbooks say.” Jack pulled up a map of the Midwest, red dots scattered across it. “Summer of 1863. While Gettysburg was happening, while Vicksburg was falling, these red dots were spreading across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. Each one, a documented Knights of the Golden Circle meeting. They weren’t trying to beat Grant’s army.”
He waited a beat, letting it land. “They were trying to convince the North that the whole thing was pointless.”
The room settled. Even the restless ones near the windows stopped shuffling papers.
“See, the Knights didn’t want to preserve the Confederacy. They wanted to build an empire.”
New, and running in every dispatch until Knights releases on August 18: one legend and one fact from the hunt.
From the Trail One Legend, One Fact
The Legend
They say Jesse James rode with the Knights of the Golden Circle, and that the famous robberies were never really about the money. The story goes the take was funneled into buried caches across Missouri, Arkansas, and the old Indian Territory, seed money for a second rising that never came. Treasure hunters still work the Ouachitas on the strength of it, following carved trees and cipher stones they swear point the way. No document ties James to the order. But the people digging have never much cared about that.
The Fact
The Knights of the Golden Circle were real, and their ambition ran larger than the Confederacy. The “golden circle” was a literal map: a ring drawn roughly 1,200 miles out from Havana, enclosing the American South, Mexico, Cuba, and much of Central America, which the order meant to weld into a single slave empire. George Bickley founded the group in the 1850s, and by the war it counted thousands of members across the Midwest. That much is documented. What became of them after 1865 is where the record thins and the legends begin.
Start the Series
New to the hunt? Start where it all began. Shadows Over Cozumel is free, and The Search for Braddock’s Lost Gold, the 2025 PenCraft Thriller of the Year, is where Jack Sullivan’s obsession starts.
From Other Authors
Horror, fantasy, mystery, sci-fi, and thriller reads, free from a shelf of independent authors.
Until next month, keep hunting.
David R Leng
Echoes of Fortune. The Past Refuses to Stay Buried… It Echoes into the Present.