Confessions of a 440-Year-Old Man

Who hated Christy Henshaw enough to shoot her in the throat with an arrow, slash her corpse with hundreds of crisscrossing wounds and deposit her naked body in Roanoke Sound? The answer is no mystery to an immortal man named John Savage, whose gift and whose curse is to recognize the dead among the living. In Henshaw’s murder, Savage divines the echoes of the ancient crime that claimed the life of his soul mate, Mary Colman, one of Sir Walter Raleigh’s famous lost colonists. Savage chases Mary, and her murderer, a Native American named Wanchese, across the pages of history. He finds them, in various incarnations, among Blackbeard’s brigands, on a Civil War battlefield and on modern day Roanoke Island where he forsakes his hatred of Wanchese and offers up his life on the altar of love. The First Ambassador is a love story, a modern-day murder mystery, and a work of historical fiction that offers a plausible, first-person account of the fate of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony of 1587.