The Broken Sword

Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1941. The sudden death of seventeen-year-old Canadian Patrick MacQueen’s little sister has wrecked his idyllic world and tore his family apart. Still clinging to his boyhood ideals of honor and glory, he lies about his age to enlist and go off to war. He never could have imagined what lay ahead.

The Broken Sword opens with Patrick MacQueen fighting to keep his head above water as a fledgling signalman in the Canadian Army. An accident on the firing range dashes his hopes and he returns to the sultry shores of his Bermuda home to recover. There he falls under the spell of a seductive Nazi sympathizer, Lady Lemonton, and just as things begin to spin out of control, he gets a second chance to get back into the war. Commissioned a Royal Canadian Navy lieutenant, he plunges into vicious battles with German U-boats on the icy North Atlantic. But even as he struggles for sanity and survival, his journey takes another unexpected turn when he meets Lady Lemonton while on leave in Ireland who promises him glory and riches–and herself–if only he will join the enemy. Does he have the strength to resist? What will become of his boyhood ideals? And where do his loyalties really lie when he emerges as a key conspirator in an attempted coup d’�tat to defend the Dominion of Newfoundland’s sovereignty from a transatlantic power play?

Inspired by the author’s own wartime experiences, The Broken Sword is a riveting coming-of-age story that offers a never before seen worm’s-eye view of the chaotic underbelly of a nation hopelessly unprepared for war and its destructive aftermath. A novel told with Norman Mailer muscle and F. Scott Fitzgerald flair, MacQueen’s arresting saga plumbs the uncharted waters of a world struggling to survive the ruthless machinations of the great powers, and lifts the veil on untold histories.