The 14th Colony : The Ground That Holds, Book Three

December 1729. The Natchez have burned the fort, killed the men, and taken the women and children. Pierre Mayeux has lost his plantation — but not his family, and not his nerve.

While New Orleans reels from the massacre, Pierre does what he has always done: he acts. He joins the French expedition upriver to answer the Natchez in kind, then turns his back on catastrophe and stakes everything on a land grant at Pointe Coupée — a raw bend of the Mississippi where the family will carve a plantation out of cane and cypress and hold it against flood, fever, and war.
Spanning four decades of French colonial Louisiana, The Ground That Holds follows the Mayeux family through the long labor of building something meant to last in a colony that keeps trying to kill it. Children are born and buried. Tobacco goes into the ground and comes out of it. Pierre crosses an ocean to face the daughter he left behind in France. And Marie — direct, unsparing, the spine of the family since the day she stepped off the ship — meets the one enemy that cannot be traded with, outworked, or endured.
When death passes the ledger from father to son, François Mayeux inherits more than land. He inherits a way of surviving. Through the Chickasaw wars, the arrival of the exiled Acadians, and the stroke of a pen in Paris that hands Louisiana to Spain, François and his children watch their world traded away by kings who have never seen the river.
Then, in 1768, New Orleans does something no colony has ever done: it rises and expels its governor. The answer comes the following summer — twenty-four Spanish ships, two thousand soldiers, and a general named O’Reilly who has not come to negotiate. In the prison courtyard, no man in the city will serve as hangman. It will not save the condemned.
Drawn from parish registers, census rolls, and colonial archives, The Ground That Holds is the third book of The 14th Colony saga — a story of a family, a river, and a colony that survived everything except the empires that owned it.

Forty years. Two flags. One family that refused to let go of the ground.

The third book in The 14th Colony series.