Coat of Nails

In October, 1781 the British surrendered at Yorktown. In 1783, the Treaty of Versailles was signed. The American Revolution was done. And the new country's growing pains began. America was not a nation. Not by any stretch of the imagination. The country was made up of thirteen states all clustered on the eastern seaboard. (The American frontier, at some points, was less than 250 miles west of the Atlantic Ocean.) With no war to bind them together, the states went their own separate ways. Thirteen legislatures, one in each state, enacted laws and printed money and levied taxes based on their own self-interests. Seven states even maintained their own navies. There were no established national policies about things like freedom of speech or religion or even freedom itself. There were, after all, some 700,000 slaves in the states with no freedom at all. It took until 1788 for the Constitution to be adopted and 1789 for George Washington to be inaugurated as the first President of the United States of America. As America set out to find itself, the new country was beset by tribulations that wore a far more personal face. Coat of Nails is unique in weaving the major events and issues of the Revolutionary era into the story without suffocating it. While Coat of Nails is an historical romance, it involves the reader in the cotton trade, slavery, English aristocracy, the Swamp Fox, and a spurned and murderous woman. The tribulations of two 'impossible' lovers is the focus of the novel. A man and woman separated by circumstances, misconceptions, and heritages that are as incompatible as the savagery of the American frontier and the chamber music of English high society.The torment can only end when the lovers realize that to find one another they must first find themselves.
About the Author: Rich Hughes is a Connecticut Yankee who graduated from The University of the South (Sewanee). He holds an MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Rich was an officer in the United States Air Force, and taught at Furman University before embarking on a 35-year career as copywriter, Creative Director, and Owner/Partner in ad agencies in South Carolina, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Diagnosed with CoPD in 2002, he nevertheless oublished his first novel, Firefly, in 2006. The disease progressed and he was placed under hospice care in early 2012. He still managed to revise the first book (now titled Code Firefly) and complete its sequel, Coat of Nails, later that same year. Rich Hughes died, two days before Thanksgiving, in November, 2012.