Empire of Bones

In Duel of Eagles, Jeff Long offered an iconoclastic portrait of the Battle of the Alamo and the band of mercenaries who died there. In Empire of Bones, Long returns to the Texas revolution, focusing on the follow-up battle to the Alamo—San Jacinto—and its beleaguered general, Sam Houston.

Long recounts how this ragtag army of 700 mutinous desperadoes flayed and gorged their way through Mexican troops sleeping off an afternoon siesta. Intent on revenge, these Texas revolutionaries slaughtered 600 Mexican soldiers in 20 minutes. When the smoke had cleared, the scavenging soldiers discovered among the butchered dead a beautiful Mexican woman. This death, so contrary to the Southern code of honor, became a symbol of the atrocities committed there, and would shroud the battle in controversy for years to come.

In spite of Houston’s own dubious personal history, Long portrays him as a sympathetic character for whom Jacinto had become a kind of moral Rubicon. Houston’s exhortations to decency fell on deaf ears, and the wanton bloodlust so sickened him that he sat out the last hours of the battle injured and in the shade of a magnolia, waiting desperately for night to come and end the slaughter.

Vivid, gripping, and grounded in historical research, Empire of Bones is a compelling fictional account of the battle and the man that changed the history of Texas.