The Loyal League series is a trilogy of Civil War espionage romances built around a real kind of secret work: Black and allied agents gathering intelligence for the Union from inside the Confederacy. It opens with An Extraordinary Union (2017), in which Elle Burns, a freedwoman with an eidetic memory, gives up her freedom in Massachusetts to pose as a mute enslaved woman in a Confederate senator's Richmond household, alongside Scottish Pinkerton detective Malcolm McCall, posing as a Rebel soldier. The series continues with A Hope Divided (2017), following healer Marlie Lynch and Union interrogator Ewan McCall in North Carolina, and concludes with An Unconditional Freedom (2019), pairing Daniel Cumberland, a free-born man kidnapped into slavery and rescued, with Janeta Sanchez, sent to infiltrate the League as a Confederate double agent. Each volume pairs a central romance with the war's dangers, and with questions of loyalty, trauma and who gets to be free.
Author: Alyssa Cole · Original publisher: Kensington Books (New York), 2017 — opening volume, An Extraordinary Union
