A French journalist encounters the American Civil War—and something even stranger—in 1861 Kentucky. Edouard de Grimouville, a supercilious French stringer for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, travels to the town of Somerset, Kentucky, on the eve of the Civil War—a conflict in which the neutral state is coveted by both sides. In The Shield That Fell from Heaven, William Kerr gives us a delightfully playful cross-genre novel whose science fiction is every bit as enjoyable as its historical fiction.