I have always enjoyed dipping into local history and, having grown up near the Gettysburg Battlefield, I've had a long fascination with Civil War history, too. Now that I've crossed the Susquehanna River and taken up residence in York County, Pennsylvania, I was happy to feed both appetites with a new volume from historian Scott Mingus, titled Marauders & Murderers: Civil War Mysteries of York County, Pa.

My former home in neighboring Lancaster County has always been proud of its one big Civil War moment: the burning of the Wrightsville-Columbia bridge, which stopped Confederate troops on their march toward Philadelphia and turned them back toward Gettysburg. I had no idea that York County had so many more Civil War stories to tell, but it turns out the southern troops were in and out of the county a great deal more than I previously had realized.

Mingus presents numerous interesting tales in this slim volume, including the story of the anonymous Union courier murdered by mistake by a fearful York County farmer, heroic Black workers who bravely faced the Confederate lines (even as their white counterparts fled in fear), unidentified rebel corpses, spies, and other Confederate sympathizers and Union patriots who lived there during the tumultuous days leading up to the three-day battle at Gettysburg.

It's a fairly quick read, but Mingus packs a lot of detail in just over 100 pages. He has a nice, conversational tone that makes for easy browsing. And he knows his stuff: Mingus has written more than two dozen books on the Civil War and the Underground Railroad, as well as articles on those and other subjects, and he maintains a blog on local Civil War history, too.

While Marauders & Murderers will be of particular interest to folks from south-central Pennsylvania, Civil War buffs will enjoy it, too.