November 22, 1963: A Novel of the Two Republics

On the twenty-second of November, 1963, the President of the United States rode in an open car through the streets of a Confederate city, and lived.Ninety-eight years after the guns fell silent at Arlington, two American republics still face each other across a fortified border: the United States, and the covenant nation of the Confederacy, ruled by its guilds and its Ten Words. When a Confederate magistrate in the Arkansas hills pulls a thread on a routine smuggling case, he uncovers something no one was ever meant to find, a conspiracy to murder a visiting president on Confederate soil, and to make the world believe the covenant nation did it.What follows is a race run in the dark by men who can never take credit for winning it: a sleepless intelligence officer who first sees the whole shape of the plot in a burn barrel, an attorney general learning to trust the enemy his grandfather taught him to despise, and two presidents who agree that the life of a guest is a matter of national honor.Their goal is not a killing but its absence. Their triumph, if they can win it, will be a Friday that history forgets, because nothing happened.Drawn from the declassified files of Operations Midnight, Dark Horse, and Valkyrie, November 22, 1963 is a novel about corruption and covenant, about two houses that answer the same darkness in two very different ways, and about the strange and costly grace of the largest nothing in the history of two nations.A Novel of the Two Republics.- Alternate history where the Confederacy survived 1865 as a covenant republic of guilds- A JFK assassination conspiracy reimagined, this time uncovered and stopped- A slow-burn Cold War political thriller built from in-world classified documents- Fully illustrated interior, an ink-drawn plate at the head of every chapterTen Words Press, Richmond.