The Compositor of Hanover Square
A Novel of Occupied New York

About this book:

In British-occupied New York, 1777, the most dangerous weapon isn't a musket—it's a printing press. Phoebe Allen spends her days setting type for the King's proclamations, her ink-stained fingers moving lead letters upside down and backward with the speed of a weaver at a loom. But when a routine broadside carries a hidden signal—a double cross stamped on a stern-post, meant for loyalist eyes only—Phoebe realizes her composing frame sits at the nerve center of the occupation. Every secret order, every troop movement, every name on a hanging list passes through her hands before it reaches the streets. And the devil's box in the corner of her case, where broken type goes to die, makes a perfect hiding place for the fragments of intelligence she smuggles out to the rebellion.

As the noose tightens—prison ships rotting in Wallabout Bay, the Provost Marshal's gallows working overtime, a handsome young officer taking too keen an interest in the "girl compositor"—Phoebe must turn the shop's own tools into instruments of resistance. A cipher hidden in justified margins. A sympathetic ink recipe disguised as a cleaning solution. A press run that delivers more than the King's words. In a city where a loose tongue means the scaffold and a smudged impression can betray a spy network, Phoebe gambles everything on the power of the printed word to outwit an empire.

Meticulously researched and steeped in the visceral reality of the 18th-century print trade—smell the lampblack, hear the press's iron screw groan, feel the bite of antimony type—*The Compositor of Hanover Square* is a spy thriller built on historical bedrock. For readers who love the atmospheric tension of *The Sympathizer*, the tradecraft detail of *The Alice Network*, and a heroine who fights with wit and metal instead of swords, this is the Revolutionary War novel you've been waiting for.