Blindspot

Written with wit and exuberance by longtime friends and accomplished historians, Blindspot is at once fiction and history, mystery and love story, tragedy and farce. Set in boisterous, rebellious Boston on the eve of the American Revolution, it ingeniously weaves together the fictional stories of a Scottish portrait painter and notorious libertine Stewart Jameson, and Fanny Easton, a fallen woman from one of Boston’s most powerful families who disguises herself as a boy to become Jameson’s defiant and seductive apprentice, Francis Weston.

When Boston’s revolutionary leader, Samuel Bradstreet, dies suddenly on the day Jameson is to paint his portrait, Bradstreet’s slaves are accused of murder. Jameson, Weston, and the brilliant African-born Oxford-educated doctor Ignatius Alexander set out to determine the truth. What they discover turns topsy-turvy everything you thought you knew about the Founding Fathers.

Peopled not only with the celebrated Sons of Liberty but also with revolutionary Boston’s unsung inhabitants—women and servants, hawkers and rogues and pickpockets—Blindspot is both prodigiously learned and lush with the bawdy sensibility of the eighteenth century. It restores the humanity, the humor, and the sex to the story of the American Revolution.