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Swimming with Serpents

Mercer University Press September 2012

Swimming with Serpents is a lush plunge into the a forgotten corner of American history: the brutal Indian wars at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Star crossed lovers share the page with the larger than life figures of history, creating a vivid, detailed story that reflects the passion and the brutality of the day and gives insight to the nation we have become.
Janis Owens author of American Ghost and My Brother Michael

Swimming with Serpents is an astonishing accomplishment, a debut novel of historical importance that is not only a reveting page-turner, but also beautifully written. Keep your eye on Sharman Ramsey, an exciting new voice in Southern fiction.
Cassandra Kng author of The Same Sweet Girls

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Boatyard Lake

Star-crossed lovers Cade Kincaid and Lyssa Rendel meet as children traveling with a pack train into Creek country. Both are of mixed blood.Ten years later Lyssa manipulates a wedding based on a childhood promise after which the two are immediately separated by the Creek War. They must survive the Massacre at Fort Mims, ensuing Creek War, and the brutality of the time to reunite. Savannah Jack, the cruelest and most frightening of all the villains of the age, captures Lyssa Rendel, Pushmataha’s adopted daughter. Lyssa valiantly draws Savannah Jack from the glade where the children she has rescued and nursed back to health are secluded after the murderous Red Stick attack and vicious depredations committed on the nearly 500 inhabitants of the 1-acre stockade built around the once-gracious plantation home of Samuel Mims.

Cade knows Savannah Jack well. He was himself captured by this blood-thirsty Creek years ago when he was associated with William Augustus Bowles who sought to set himself up as the emperor of the Creek nation upon the death of Alexander McGillivray. The compelling stories of the individuals caught up in the seismic forces of conflicting cultures conveys a human drama of war weaving a tale the theme of which is as applicable today as it was 200 years ago when this pivotal event occurred August 30, 1813. “If war is the will of God—a judgment upon evil—why must the innocents perish?” From the recesses of time—from the infancy of our new nation— veterans of that revolution fought another war. The voices of those forgotten people cry out to have their lives remembered. This is their story.