The Courier's Wife

She can lie to the enemy. She can't lie to herself.

Hattie Logan didn't join the Pinkerton spy ring to fall in love. She joined to escape a family she can't forgive and prove she's more than the girl they tried to marry off.

When war reaches Washington, Hattie trades her privileged life for a desk in a cramped Pinkerton office, intercepting Confederate mail and cracking enemy ciphers alongside the other mailroom girls. It isn't enough. She wants real work, the kind that matters, the kind her family never believed she was capable of.

She gets her chance when she's assigned to pose as the wife of Thom Welton, a Union courier who slips behind enemy lines under cover of Confederate sympathies. Playing the part means crossing into hostile territory and trusting a man she barely knows with her life. But before long, it becomes hard to remember which parts of her marriage are pretense and which have quietly become real.

In a world of secrets, Hattie also conceals one of her own, a coded letter implicating her own family in a smuggling scheme to aid the Confederacy. Concealing it could protect her position. Revealing it could be the only way to save the mission and the man she's come to care for. With a double agent closing in and her disguise unraveling by the day, Hattie must decide what she's willing to sacrifice: her family's secret, her own safety, or a love she never planned on finding.

A Civil War story of courage, deception, and the cost of secrets, inspired by the real women of the Pinkerton spy network. For readers who love intrepid heroines, Civil War history brought vividly to life, and high-stakes espionage in the tradition of The Alice Network and Code Name Verity.

Book One of the Secrets of the Blue and Gray series