Pirate Queen

<p>In a life stranger than any fiction, Grace O'Malley, daughter of a clan chief in the far west of Ireland, went from marriage at fifteen to piracy on the high seas. She soon had a fleet of galleys under her commander, but her three decades of plundering, kidnapping, murder and mayhem came to a close in 1586, when she was captured and sentenced to hang.</p> <p>Saved from the scaffold by none other than Queen Elizabeth herself – another powerful woman in a man's world – Grace's life took another extraordinary turn, when it was rumoured she had become intelligencer for the queen's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. Was this the price of her freedom?</p> <p>Judith Cook explores this and other questions about the life and times of this remarkable woman in a fascinating, thrilling and impeccably researched book.</p>