The Patriot Witch (Traitor to the Crown)

The year is 1775. On the surface, Proctor Brown appears to be an ordinary young man working the family farm in New England. He is a minuteman, a member of the local militia, determined to defend the rights of the colonies. Yet Proctor is so much more. Magic is in his blood, a dark secret passed down from generation to generation. But Proctor’s mother has taught him to hide his talents, lest he be labeled a witch and find himself dangling at the end of a rope.

A chance encounter with an arrogant British officer bearing magic of his own catapults Proctor out of his comfortable existence and into the adventure of a lifetime, as resistance sparks rebellion and rebellion becomes revolution. Now, even as he fights alongside his fellow patriots from Lexington to Bunker Hill, Proctor finds himself enmeshed in a war of a different sort–a secret war of magic against magic, witch against witch, with the stakes not only the independence of a young nation but the future of humanity itself.

C. C. Finlay was born in 1964 in New York City but soon thereafter was banished to rural Ohio. His childhood was divided equally between playing in the woods and reading his way through the fiction shelves of his small town’s Carnegie library. Like Jay Gatsby, he studied abroad briefly at the University of Oxford, and it was there, at New College, founded in 1379 around a remnant of the old city wall built by William the Conqueror, that he fell in love with history. He studied literature at Capital University and did graduate work in history at the Ohio State University, where he was a research assistant on two award-winning books about the U.S. Constitution. He started writing fiction after the birth of his first son because he wanted to set an example about chasing one’s dreams. He lives in Columbus with his wife, Rae, and two sons, all smart readers, who keep him honest.