Books by Linda Collison

Newport Rhode Island: 1765 The Seven Years War is over but unrest in the American colonies is just heating up.

Portsmouth, England,1760. Patricia Kelley, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Barbadian sugarcane planter, falls from her imagined place in the world when her absent father unexpectedly dies. Raised in a Wiltshire boarding school sixteen-year-old Patricia embarks on a desperate crossing on a merchantman bound for Barbados, where she was born, in a brash attempt to claim an unlikely inheritance. Aboard a merchantman under contract with the British Navy to deliver gunpowder to the West Indian forts, young Patricia finds herself pulled between two worlds -- and two identities -- as she charts her own course for survival in the war-torn 18th century.

Patrick MacPherson is a qualified surgeon's mate; but she's not the man he claims to be. It's late October, 1762. After surviving the deadly siege of Havana, Patrick MacPherson and the rest of the ship's company are looking forward to a well deserved liberty in New York. But what happens in that colonial town will change the surgeon's mate's life in ways she could never have imagined. Using a dead man's identity, young Patricia Kelley MacPherson is making her way as Patrick MacPherson, surgeon's mate aboard His Majesty's frigate Richmond. She's become adept at bleeding, blistering, and amputating limbs; but if her cover is blown, she'll lose both her livelihood and her berth aboard the frigate. The ship's gunner alone knows her secret - or does someone else aboard suspect that Patrick MacPherson is not the man he claims to be? Surgeon's Mate, book two of the Patricia MacPherson Nautical Adventure Series, is a work of fiction inspired in part by the historical accounts of actual 17th and 18th century soldiers, sailors and marines who were in fact women. Included in this group were Christian Davies, Hannah Snell, Mary Lacy, Mary Anne Talbot, Deborah Sampson, and Chevalier d'Eon, to name but a few.