Amber Cloud is a very different Western. We follow a girl named Jessie, in her early teens she has lived her whole life in a small town just west of the Mississippi. Jessie was born just after the civil war and her whole world has been her small out of the way sleepy, dusty town. Her mother's best friend Josephine, just moved back into the town, her children were Jessie and her sister Mikey's best friends before Josephine and her boys moved back east. Josephine left town following a bitter separation, and her return brings conflict and questions with her two sons and with her ex-husband. Jessie shares her love of the mystical "cowboy life" portrayed in the dime novels of the time and her love of the six-shooter. The beloved town doctor is shot, horses are stolen from the livery and Josephine's boys go missing in the dead of night, the talk of a posse spurns Jessie to go after the boys despite her father's wish to stay out of, what her father sees as a family dispute. Jessie's rescue mission is quickly complicated, when she is mistaken for one of the boy's. Her father comes to the rescue, but not the stogy shopkeeper father she has known but by the man, her father was during the Civil war, a dashing and heroic army scout. Together they ride to save the boys. Along the way, they join up with her father's old army unit and a group of Polish immigrants her father once saved from a deadly fever. The army unit turns out to be an elite civil war anti-guerrilla unit and the Polish immigrants turn out to be Polish Lancers, the finest cavalry unit in all of Europe. Their ride to save the boys, is much, much more, it is a ride straight into a trap. A trap set by a bitter foe of Jessie's Dad, a vile southern bushwhacker, the Snake of the South.