Trotter is certainly more fun to read. He reads like a novel. Victims does give a little more background on Allen and Keith though. Many of the incidents in Cold Mountain come from the same sources as Trotter but things are changes...yanks do what rebs did and vice a versa...regular troop did what home guard did and vice a versa.

A major factor in Frazier's novel was finding the bodies of two men killed by George W. Kirk on a mountain in the Smokies. Not far away he located the bodies of a fiddler and retarde boy killed by Teagues Confederate Home Guard. Story is they played Bonaparte's Retreat as they were shot. You will find this incident in Trotter's Bushwhacker's as well as the movie Cold Mountain. In the movie they got that part right....Confederate not Union and Home Guard not Regular Soldiers. My favorite part of the movie is when the preacher is being rowed across the river, but I won't elaborate on that...lol.