The Spy (1821)

By James Fennimore Cooper | Retelling by A.C. Clark
137 pages

Hated as a traitor. Hunted as a spy. He was his country's only hope.

The year is 1780. The American Revolution has turned Westchester County into a lawless wasteland known as the “Neutral Ground.” Caught between the British and American armies, the Wharton family struggles to survive. Their secret is as dangerous as the war itself: their son, Henry, is a captain in the British army, and he has come home in disguise.

When Henry is captured by American dragoons, his fate falls into the hands of the noble Major Peyton Dunwoodie—an officer torn between his duty to his country and his love for Henry’s sister, Frances. The family’s only hope seems to lie with Harvey Birch, a mysterious and greedy peddler who is despised by his neighbors as a British spy. But Birch is a man of shadows and secrets, playing a deadly game of his own.

As the relentless Captain Lawton hunts the peddler through the hills, and a web of betrayal and honor tightens around the Whartons, a single question remains: in a land where loyalties are for sale and no one is what they seem, who is the real traitor, and who is the true patriot?