Magnolia Grove

Book excerpt: Heisman Trophy winner and college football star Michael Levesque returns home to his parents' mansion in New Orleans for Easter, to find that his father, a wealthy oil tycoon, has purchased a beautiful, but dilapidated Mississippi river-front antebellum mansion, that he intends to demolish to make way for a new oil refinery. Michael and his sister are appalled by their father's plans and set out to save the house. They soon become aware of the mansions historical importance, and are both troubled by eerie glimpses of the past. Ultimately, Michael finds himself on an impossible journey that leads him back to the mansion at the time of the Civil War. There he meets a beautiful young woman, one of the early owners of the mansion, and he becomes involved in a life and death struggle to save the house, and its beautiful owner, from the ravages of the war and the designs of a renegade Union cavalry officer.