Dreams of the Dead is a 19th century tale about characters whose lives begin on different continents but whose destinies are intertwined by dangerous common fate.

An 1860's account of a horrible murder appears in a London newspaper. 8-year-old AmeliaWooderker awakensin black consciousness contemplating the injustice of her premature death. She is not alone. Friend, Jen Freeman is with her, silent in the darkness. A spiritual savant, Jen witnessed their terrifying slaughter. Her dilemma; how to prevent her murder? Her resolve; to join herself to solider, Ethan Daniels, who's family is similarly doomed.

Later Jen returns to life face down on a battle field in South Africa during the Boer wars. Though she's in temporary control of Ethan's body, Jen is woefully inept at warfare, resulting in his injury, loss of command, and extraction.
He is ferried to the cape colony home of Harland Tate to recover.

There Ethan meets Harland's daughter, Mary, who becomes hopelessly enamored with the married father of five. Furious over her inability to seduce him, Mary attacks Ethan, rendering him comatose. While he's unconscious, Mary repeatedly violates him. When her indiscretion is discovered, the pregnant Mary is shipped off to an asylum at the insistence of her mother, Julia, and a clueless, recovered Ethan returns to England and his wife, Roheida. Increasingly, Jen's connection to Ethan weakens before finally disappearing.

Meanwhile, in America, Humble Jenkins, a young, self-emancipated black man is hiding in Baltimore‘s large community of free blacks. Humble's most persistent desire- to find and free his mother, Madre, from slavery. He befriends Elmer Jobe Fleetwood, and together they free Elmer's daughter, Irma, from a newly built Baltimore prison. Friends, Samuel and Huda, and Rachel Josephson hide Irma until a mob's attack forces them all to flee the city. They spend the winter hiding in a northern Maryland before moving to Pennsylvania the following spring.
Humble and Irma marry and their daughter, Jen,is born in Philadelphia, while Amelia is born to Chief Inspector Devlin Wooderker in London, where he's investigating a string of murders.
Possessing uncanny insight into the future, Jen's repeated visions haunt her as she struggles to make sense of what she believes will come to pass. Finally, at the pinnacle of the civil war in America, the lives of Amelia, Jen and Ethan converge. As each person moves toward an uncertain future, past events shape current ones and Jen's visions; her dreams of the dead come closer to fruition.
Dreams of the Dead, a work of historical fiction, is a simple exercise in storytelling that explores the irony of American blacks fleeing to England in search of a better life just as millions of Europeans journey to America seeking the same. It explores questions of whether madness occurs without cause, or if it is invariably linked to past cruelty, and ponders if even murderers can experience redemptive change.