Agent 355

New York Colony, 1765-1783

When Patsy MacDonald married Will Whitcomb, the second son in a prominent, wealthy Manhattan family, she assumed that her future was secure, that she would be plagued by few-if any-question marks. She assumed that she would live out her years supporting her husband in his every decision, comporting herself in such a way that she would avoid bringing any scandal into their home, and busying herself with the task of bearing and raising his children.

What Patsy could never have foreseen, however, was that she and Will had married on the eve of the American colonies' battle for independence from England. She could not have foreseen that her husband, who hailed from a Loyalist family, would join the Continental Congress and help pen the very Declaration of Independence that would be sent to King George III. She could not have foreseen that he would join the Continental Army under General George Washington.

She could not have foreseen that he would die in battle, leaving her the widow of a traitor in the middle of a disastrous war.

Knowing that if the rebels lose the War of Independence, her husband's lands and properties will be confiscated by the British government, and she and their children would be left with nothing, Patsy finds herself in the most unforeseen position of them all: Posing as a Loyalist, entrenched in a New York society composed of Loyalists and British officers. Hosting one such British officer in her own home, Patsy joins the war effort as a spy, gathering intelligence that will be sent on to General Washington.

In doing so, she joins the secret Culper Ring as its most mysterious and controversial agent, a woman history knows only as Agent 355.