Soldier, Spy

The New York City islands of Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long Island were occupied by the British during virtually the entire American Revolutionary War from 1775 to beyond the war-ending Treaty of Paris in 1783, with both the early and the last shots of the war being fired there. Some seven thousand Americans who were British sympathizers sailed away with the British when they left.

The story of the occupation of this major American city during the Revolutionary War years is told here in the third of the Dirk’s America’s Founding Collection trilogy in the story of the meetings and separations of the Continental Army artillery solder, Lieutenant Douglas Bester, and his nominally British-sympathizing spy younger lover, Timothy Grady. The lives of these two bittersweet lovers intertwine through struggle and misunderstanding from the first British cannon barrage of lower Manhattan, through the winter in Valley Forge, to the British withdrawal from New York in 1783.

The earlier works in this trilogy include Colonel’s Treasure, on the exploits of the young American spy, Rob Winston, in the American Revolutionary War’s Mohawk Valley campaign, and To the Hessian Hills, the tale of a young German mercenary captured in the Battle of Saratoga during the Revolutionary War, his survival by satisfying the desires of men, and his march from the New York colony to, and imprisonment in, the Hessian Hills near Thomas Jefferson’s home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

All three books are included in the paperback Dirk’s America’s Founding Collection.