As a young man, Edward Smith was devoted to his mother, or so everyone thought. When she disappeared, Edward began a downward spiral into the dark abyss of mental illness. In spite of his illness, Edward was a genius with an eidetic memory, and he used those attributes to his own advantage many times throughout his relatively short adult life. He even fought heroically in World War I and earned the nation's third-highest honor for gallantry in combat. He gets justice in the end for his wrongdoings, but from a very unexpected quarter.This book, the third in the author's "Lineage" series, expands on the main characters of Book One ("Lineage: A Novel"), Chapter One. Tracing a family tree back more than a couple of generations is a challenge. It takes significant research and analytic skills to debunk genealogical information that may have been passed down verbally from generation to generation. However, once a string of details start falling into place, skeletons begin emerging from unsuspected places. This series uses some of those skeletons as the basis for historical perspectives of distant relatives, some as far back as 15 generations. The author took great care to ensure that the premise of each book was fictional, even though some of the historical situations actually happened. In other words, a seamless blend of facts and reality.