The Great Chain of West Point
A Novel of Iron and Espionage

About this book:

Winter 1778. The Hudson Highlands are buried in ice, the Continental Army is starving at Valley Forge, and the British fleet sits in New York Harbor waiting for the spring thaw to sail north and sever the colonies in two. The only thing that can stop them is a chain—sixteen hundred feet of two-inch square iron bar, forged in six weeks at a remote mountain furnace and stretched across the river at West Point.

Peter Townsend, ironmaster of Sterling Iron Works, knows the metal, the men, and the mountains. He also knows the job is impossible: forty tons of perfect iron, hauled through Tory-infested passes, welded by exhausted smiths working round the clock, all while Claudius Smith's Loyalist raiders circle like wolves. His only ally is Thomas Becket, a shadowed intelligence operative with his own blood feud against the men who burned his father's land. Together they must turn fire and hammer into a barrier that holds—or watch the revolution drown in the Hudson.

From the roar of the blast furnace to the knife-work in the snow-choked Clove, *The Great Chain of West Point* forges a thriller of industrial grit and quiet espionage, where the fate of a continent rests not on a battlefield, but on the strength of a weld, the loyalty of a crew, and the will of men who refuse to let the fire go out.