Professor Lawrence Miller lost his son Val. Brokenhearted, he could sense his son calling out from beyond the grave and so, recklessly, Miller followed his son into the afterlife. After great turmoil and with the help of Franco, his long-deceased father, Lawrence and Val are reunited. Now they wander the “Seam”— that ever-shifting place between this world and whatever comes next — helping other souls.

In The Shepherd, Volume 2: The Path of Souls, the Millers entered an extraordinary district in the Seam, a “hospital” for souls of warriors who were killed in combat and are unable to move past the traumatic events surrounding their deaths.

Now in The Path of Dogs, the starling conclusion to The Path of Souls, young Val, Lawrence, and Franco find themselves separated and each facing desperate situations. Val, joined by Private Will Brannigan, had volunteered to make his way through the enemy held neighborhoods of the Jolan District of Fallujah. However, the Seam shifts and Fallujah gives away to Fredericksburg, Maryland. Brannigan is no Marine at all but rather a Confederate infantryman of the 13th Mississippi. For his part, Lawrence, accompanied by Napoleon’s chausser Henri-Jacques Tournier and the embittered Wendat Sondaqua, straddles the vastly divergent spiritual domains of 1799 Jaffa and the bloodstained longhouses of 1648 Wendake. While his son and grandson face centuries’ old threats, Franco must rally the beleaguered Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines as dark forces encircle them.