"Fidget's Mill was a town full of secrets, populated by people who had no idea how to keep them."

It is a time of revolution in the American colonies, an epoch in which men of exceptional talent and ambition agitate to reshape the course of human events. Their names will pass into legend: Washington. Adams. Jefferson. Hamilton. Madison. Monroe.

Denton Hedges is there too, and he's trying his best.

In the inauspicious year of 1767, he volunteers to visit a no-account Massachusetts seaside town called Fidget's Mill. His goal is simple: secure a non-importation agreement, so that the colonies might adopt a stronger negotiating position with England. There's no reason for him to get mixed up with a forbidden love triangle, a witch, demons, or the three moneyed families jockeying for control of the town. And yet...

He really is trying his best.