A beautiful young Quaker woman brings Ethan Randolph home to the family plantation after his imprisonment and torture by the British Navy, and Ethan begins to recover and fall in love with his lovely savior, Judith Mercer.
Rachel LeMoyne, a mixed-blood Choctaw raised in a Presbyterian mission, knows that her calling in 1847 is to travel to Ireland to feed the starving people there with her own people’s life-giving surplus corn. But she never expects to find a husband among the hungry and grief-stricken people–especially not a husband considered to be an outlaw.
When Rachel and Darragh return to America as husband and wife, a new challenge awaits her: they must flee to escape the authorities still searching for Darragh. But with the Irish, like the Blacks and Indians, deemed “unfit for liberty,” facing factories posting “No Irish Need Apply” signs, the only place to go is west to the wild country promised to anyone who can survive the journey.
Struggling to build her career as a journalist for the Gold Coast Chronicle in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, Olana Whittaker, the daughter of a lumber baron, finds her life changed forever by ranger Matthew Hart, an ardent conservationist out to protect the land from people like her father.
Luke Kayenta and his childhood friend Nantai Riggs are young shepherds of the Navajo reservation in Arizona. They volunteer for an experiment: to come up with an uncrackable code based on their language to be used by the US as it enters World War II. They fly into New York to join the spy agency the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). While on the airfield, Luke catches sight of a young woman. He is first enchanted, then heartsick when he finds that Kitty Charante is the devoted wife of his Canadian RAF pilot and instructor in espionage. Their paths will cross again.
In the mountains between Spain and Nazi-occupied France, Luke and Nantai practice the code between radio stations while helping on Allied missions.
But off the coast, German SS agent Helmut Adler is celebrating his latest U-Boat conquest when he hears something crackling over the radio lines. When a young soldier of World War I, an American Indian language helped bring down his regiment in the Battle of Meuse-Argonne. Adler swears it will not happen again in this war. He sets his sights on the code talkers.
The hunt has begun.
At first, war widow Kitty Charente thinks she’s showing one of her boss’s salesman a day out on the town. But Luke Kayenta is undercover: he’s a Navajo code talker, and Nazi Agent Helmut Adler is hunting him in 1942 New York City. Isolationists are searching for Luke too. And his superiors at the the U.S. Office of Strategic Services want to know if he’s cracked under torture in Spain.