History remembers her as a martyr. The truth is much darker. July 1777. The upper Hudson Valley is a powder keg. British General John Burgoyne’s unstoppable army is marching south toward Fort Edward, flanked by fierce Native scouts. The local colonial militias are retreating, and terrified farmers are ready to swear oaths to the King just to save their crops. The American rebellion is on the verge of breathing its last before the harvest. Enter Major Benjamin Tupper, a cynical Patriot officer who realizes that to win a war, he must first manufacture a monster. Jane McCrea is the perfect pawn. Young, beautiful, and betrothed to a loyalist British lieutenant, she walks between two worlds. When she is brutally murdered and scalped in a secluded ravine, a wave of raw, manufactured fury ignites the countryside. Armed with grief and vengeful outrage, hundreds of peaceful farmers turn into cold-blooded killers, turning the tide of the American Revolution. But the horror wasn't born in the northern woods. It was mixed in a dark root cellar, painted onto the faces of local rebel militia disguised as British allies, and printed on a hidden press. As Jane’s grieving lover, Lieutenant David Jones, and a sharp British tracker, Captain Alexander Fraser, follow the anomalous clues toward the heart of the conspiracy, they are forced to confront a terrifying question: How much blood is a new nation worth? And what happens when winning the war means protecting the monstrous lie that started it? A gripping historical thriller rich with atmospheric suspense, America the Deceitful subverts one of the early republic’s greatest pieces of wartime propaganda, exposing the clinical, calculated alchemy of blood that birthed a nation.
