The Whaleboat Men of Long Island Sound
A Novel of the Revolutionary War's Hidden Coast

About this book:

Long Island Sound, December 1778: the Revolution has shed its uniforms. Between British-occupied Long Island and rebel Connecticut lies eighty miles of black, freezing water—an ungoverned wasteland where neighbor hunts neighbor in thirty-foot whaleboats, and the only law is the rhythm of the oars. Caleb Reed commands one such craft, seven desperate men pulling through phosphorus-lit darkness to intercept Loyalist raiders, smuggle intelligence, and settle blood debts older than the war. His quarry is Elihu Palmer: once his friend, now a Tory captain who knows every cove and creek of Caleb's home shore. When a midnight collision at the Cows reef reveals Palmer isn't running cattle but carrying a leather pouch from a traitor on the Connecticut side, Caleb is pulled into a shadow war of spies, signal fires, and knives in the dark—where the man trying to cut your throat went to the same schoolhouse as your father.

Major Benjamin Tallmadge offers Caleb a pass to land on Long Island itself: Fortress Britannia, ten thousand redcoats and Hessians, where capture means a rope and no trial. The target is Setauket, the Culper Ring, and the truth behind the lists of names Palmer smuggled across the Sound. But the ice is forming early, the British sloops are hunting, and Abigail Palmer—Elihu's sister, Caleb's oldest ghost—has just warned him that the silver buckle on the traitor's shoe belongs to a man Caleb breaks bread with in Fairfield.

In *The Whaleboat Men of Long Island Sound*, the Revolution isn't fought by armies but by watermen who read the tide like scripture, who fight with swivel guns loaded with scrap iron and musket balls, and who know that in the Devil's Belt, there is no room for both the hunter and the hunted. Sharp as a belaying pin and cold as December salt, this is the war you haven't read about—the one waged in the dark between the lines.