“An ambitious and lush tale set during the Civil War and Reconstruction.”—Kirkus Reviews.

In “the city that reads,” where Ravens are heroes and the rage, a Baltimore Post-Examiner headline declared: “Gripping Saga of Isaac Rice, a Runaway Slave, is a Hero’s Journey. [Don’t] be surprised if First Dark ends up as a popular movie.”

Bob Rogers is a former US Army captain and a combat veteran of the Vietnam War. Later, he sojourned for thirty-three years at IBM. Bob was also a charter member of the Baltimore, Maryland chapter of the 9th and 10th (Horse) Cavalry Association.

Bob published his first novel, Hitting Life’s Curveballs, in October 2009. In the years since, he released historical novels, First Dark: A Buffalo Soldier’s Story, The Laced Chameleon, the novella, Sacrifice at Shiloh Church, and a memoir with a fellow Vietnam War veteran, My Blue Yonder.

“Entertaining to educate” is the motto for his writing and work. His memory of incidents, typified by the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 and his own adversarial encounters with armed white Americans, guides his calm messages about “the road over which we’ve traveled.” In his novel, First Dark, Bob weaves the tale of an escaped slave from Charleston, South Carolina who serves the Union Army as a teenage laborer during the Civil War before taking up arms as a Buffalo Soldier during the Reconstruction Era and the Indian Wars. Like Hitting Life’s Curveballs before it, First Dark uses the lives of ordinary people and their encounters with the actions and policies of historic actual heroes and villains to bring alive their struggles. Bob employs anecdotes and stories from historical figures in science, military, politics, entertainment, entrepreneurship, and other disciplines to illuminate “the road over which we’ve traveled” within his entertaining and enlightening historical novels.

Bob lives in Mérida, Yucatan, México.