The Artificer of West Point
A Novel of the Great Chain and the Traitor's Plot

About this book:

Winter 1778. The Hudson River is the Revolution's jugular, and the British Navy is poised to sever it. At Sterling Forge, artificer Elijah Vector wrestles white-hot iron into links thick as a man's thigh—fifteen hundred of them, each required to hold thirty thousand pounds of tidal fury. He has six weeks before the spring thaw. He has no money, exhausted woodcutters, a quartermaster corps feeding mules pine needles, and a Quaker ironmaster who thinks the whole endeavor is madness. But if the Great Chain fails, New England is cut off, and the war ends before autumn.

Then the couriers start disappearing. Timber frames vanish from depots. Powder kegs go missing. Colonel Putnam hands Elijah a green-leather ledger and a quiet order: *oversee the installation yourself, and watch your back.* Someone in the Highlands knows the chain's every dimension, every anchor point, every weakness—and they're selling that knowledge to the King.

From the sulfurous roar of the Ramapo Mountains to the ice-slick cliffs of West Point, *The Artificer of West Point* forges a thriller from the Revolution's most audacious engineering feat. Here is the war not as grand strategy but as sweat and calculation: the weld that must not crack, the oxen that must not founder, the traitor who moves like a shadow through the encampment. Elijah Vector builds the weapon that will save a nation—if he lives long enough to drop it in the water.