Beating the Odds in Colonial New York • 2017 Book Excellence Awards Finalist for Fiction • 2017 Winner 50 Great Writers You Should Be Reading Kidnapped in France and brought to America as an indentured servant a young woman takes on the brutal merchant king of New York’s East River waterfront… Illness suddenly deprives 17-year-old Sarah Da Silva and her older brother Jacob of a mother. Before Sarah has come to terms with that loss her merchant father grows frail and increasingly desperate in the face of impending bankruptcy. On the rainy night their father scours the docks of Bordeaux France to make his final bid to save his family his children are kidnapped and forced onto a ship bound for New York City where they’ll be separated and sold to the highest bidder as indentured labor. Purchased by a grotesque merchant whose wealth backed by a team of henchmen allows him to dominate the chaotic East River docks Sarah strikes back the only way she can. Vowing to never allow him to put his hands on her again she presses a knife to his fat neck. She demands her freedom a roof over her head and the means to start a business. Her leverage? Knowledge obtained on the voyage that would bring the big man to his knees forever. He yields to her demands but privately swears to become her worst nightmare.
