Editor’s Note:  With an admitted uncertainty about detail and Meltzer’s unconfessed sprinkling of cheap fiction chapter endings, this is an outstanding non-fiction read.  It’s also pretty certainly true and supportable that a key to British strategy of putting down our rebellion was to eliminate the leader of our march to independence, General Washington himself, from inside his security force known as the First Guard.  But what makes this book most interesting to me is to learn just how outnumbered and undisciplined our original American army was in 1775-76 as it was being organized.

Excerpt:  “George Washington summarizes his army’s prospects in a candid letter to his brother, John Augustine: ‘we are expecting a very bloody summer in New York and I am sorry to say that we are not, either in men or in arms, prepared for it.’”