Product details
- ISBN 9781493088485
- Weight: 381g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jun 2025
- Publisher: Globe Pequot Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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A story of desperate immigrates looking for adventure, advancement, love, and most of all, a sense of belonging, in the New World.
London, 1763: Gifted musician and medical apprentice Michael Shea is living rough after being blackballed from working as a surgeon's assistant. Not only does Michael lose his gig playing fiddle in a tavern, he also is framed for the murder of a tavern patron visiting from colonial Virginia. Worse, Michael realizes his ladylove wasn't interested in true love. He was just a divertissement.
Heartbroken and out of options, Michael and his friend Danny escape the turmoil by shipping out on the misnamed brig The Delight as lowly indentured servants. On board are forty-eight other desperate souls—everyday people risking their lives to immigrate to the wilds of America, hoping for a better life in the New World where they can break free of a rigid class system, prejudice, and poverty. Michael’s medical skills prove critical as the passengers endure the ravages of the long trans-Atlantic journey from London to Annapolis: killer storms, accidents, sickness, and Barbary raiders. While attending to the sick, Michael realizes that he has not yet escaped the murder for which he was framed—and that the real killer will do anything to keep his identity a secret.
Thomas Guay has degrees in history and communications from the University of Maryland and became a journalist because he enjoys writing and telling stories. After a career as a Capitol Hill reporter covering current events (tomorrow’s history), he refocused on colonial history and started researching what became this book, working as a host at the Charles Carrol House in Annapolis, as a reenactor and tour guide at other historic colonial houses, and researching the plight of indentured servants, the Peggy Stewart, and other tax-related uprisings in the Chesapeake Bay region. He lives in Annapolis, Maryland, and plays traditional fiddle tunes with the popular music group Them Eastport Oysterboys.
