Distant Drums — Diane Carey

Tidewater Virginia, 1832. A young country grinds toward civil war, and one man torn between two worlds will transform many lives in his struggle for identity and power. Dorian Trozen has his slave mother's unconquerable pride and will, his father's white skin and cunning. Educated in secret by his father's wife, loved by two mothers, white and black, he is bound to the plantation, never to see the world he knows through his precious books. And when his two lives clash in an inevitable moment of violence, he wins his beloved freedom and plunges headlong into a deep well of rage.

From brutal bondage to fugitive flight for a crime he didn't commit, Dorian has made the bitter choice to follow the fortunes of the South. With battle lines drawn between North and South, black and white, he is the man who will cross them all, with only his life and his soul to lose.