The adventures of Victoria Lightfoot began in The Witch From the Sea. A swashbuckler set in the West Indies of the early 19th Century, it's a love story, a coming-of-age adventure, and an eccentric comedy of manners about a woman who runs with the pirates to free herself from the conventional "rules" of gender, race and class.
All Tory has ever wanted is her freedom. A runaway orphan of mixed white and native Mohawk blood, she flees the stifling intolerance of 1823 Boston for the open sea. But when the merchant ship on which she stows away is boarded by pirates off the coast of Cuba, Tory makes the decision to join the pirate crew to save her life. Making herself useful as both log-keeper and spy, among a crew of outcasts from all nations, she earns a measure of the independence she craves. Beguiled by her handsome, reckless Yankee crewmate, Matty, she's mentored by Englishman Jack—acrobat, failed actor, and wry observer on the human condition—who teaches her to survive in the pirate trade.
Even within a community of pirates, Tory copes with timeless issues that all women face— finding her own identity, making her place in the world and navigating her way through the often treacherous world of men. But there's trouble on the horizon when the fledgling U. S. Navy dispatches its elite West Indian Squadron to eradicate the Cuban pirates. As fate, fever and the relentless Squadron close in, Tory must risk her hard-won freedom to save the man she loves.
In Runaways: A Novel of Jonkanoo, Tory and Jack have fetched up in the Leeward Islands of the West Indies. Freedom is a luxury in the British colonial sugar islands, teeming as they are with a combustible population of wealthy planters, free people of color, and slaves; the fear of slave rebellion, real or imagined, infests everything. Teaming up with the mysterious Alphonse Belair, a nimble, cultured former slave, Jack and Tory learn to navigate both high and low island society, devising a ribald traveling pantomime show, with Jack and Tory playing Harlequin and Columbina to Alphonse's Mr. Punch.
Their troupe expands to include fortune-teller and healer Cybele Le Blanc and her flock of mismatched, mixed-race children, and music hall performers Captain Billy and Ada Bruce, lately of London. And while their entertainments are popular with the English society at the luxurious Bath Hotel on Nevis, and the military station at English Harbor, Antigua, their authority-tweaking antics are particularly beloved by the slaves at the Sunday markets— outraging the authorities.
When the troupe is pursued by a vengeful island constable, Jack and Tory struggle to outrun their outlaw past. But when Tory disappears, Jack risks everything to find her, while Tory finds herself trapped in a web of enslavement worse than any she has ever imagined. Regaining her own freedom and protecting everything she loves will take the performance of a lifetime.
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